As 2016 draws to a close, New Times is looking back at the year’s stories that had the most impact. Ten film and TV articles stood out from the rest, according to their high number of readers. This year, Miami readers proved to be an eclectic bunch, clicking on a weird mélange of pieces that one might not expect. So what’s on the list?
Nice girls play by the rules. They turn their shoulders inward and nibble on the ends of their slim fingers, nervous about all those difficult thoughts in their heads. And their hair is always perfect and feathery like a baby bird on a collector’s plate. If this description sounds angry,…
Few Spanish filmmakers are as well-known and widely loved as Pedro Almodóvar, the man behind Volver, Todo sobre mi madre, and Hable con ella. With his latest film, Julieta, hitting Miami theaters on January 6th, O Cinema is launching a retrospective of his work, including seven of his features. “For…
After announcing its nominees last Wednesday, the Florida Film Critics Circle revealed its winners yesterday. Though the Miami-made film Moonlight earned 10 nominations from the critics this year, it ended up with just one win in its nominated categories: The Pauline Kael Breakout Award for director Barry Jenkins. Moonlight and its cast…
Like craft beers or your news feed, Netflix’s niche-viewing categories are forever growing more micro-specific. Its new drama series, an eight-part bafflement called The OA, could only be categorized as a Sexually Frank Spiritual Locked-Room Suburban Afterlife Mad Scientist Communitarian Interpretive-Dance Ripped-From-the-Headlines Horror Puzzle Mystery. Its flavors never unite into…
With awards season at its peak and every critics association handing out prizes, the Florida Film Critics Circle (FFCC) announced its nominations for 2016 yesterday. The official winners will be revealed Friday, but Moonlight came out on top of the nominee list with ten well-deserved nods.
Director Ava DuVernay’s breakthrough 2014 film, Selma, earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Director, the first for a female African-American auteur. The Compton-raised filmmaker is now helming television shows like Queen Sugar and the upcoming big budget fantasy film, A Wrinkle in Time .
Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven has dedicated his career to sifting through trash to extract ugly truths. He’s a former math and physics student who decided movies make more sense, but it’s hard to picture him crunching numbers and plugging in formulas and dealing with absolute answers, as his proudly pugnacious…
Accepting the Welt Literature Prize in Berlin on November 10 of this year, the novelist Zadie Smith said, “Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.” She was speaking, of course, of the conviction among so many white people that there’s…
I shouldn’t have to explain why Fences, the August Wilson play set in the 1950s and now adapted for the screen, is important. If you’ve stepped anywhere near the theater — and I mean the playhouse here — you’ve read, seen, or heard about it. Wilson, who didn’t study theater…
The Assassin’s Creed video games are about skipping through tedious cut scenes set in the present so that you can vault into the past, through and over gorgeous recreations of the roofs and streets of medieval and Renaissance cities. Sometimes you chase floating feathers through Florence. Often, you’ll sneak behind…
Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home examines, in its uncertain prose, one of the signal concerns of our age: How do those of us who have grown up in relative comfort square our good luck with the lot of the rest of the world? That question gets feinted at…
In the early scenes of the sci-fi drama Passengers, Chris Pratt gets to be every dope who ever woke up in the middle of the night, thought it was morning and started to make the coffee. Too bad for him, morning is still 90 years away, and the coffee sucks…
In the pantheon of American First Ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy was no Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn’t push for policy, didn’t relinquish her pillbox hat to walk among the needy, didn’t travel to foreign countries as an ambassador and certainly didn’t advise her husband on matters of war. Jackie Kennedy’s role was…
2017 looks like it won’t be an improvement over 2016, so here are some promising films — either reviewed or previewed — to distract you in the next three months. In keeping with the pessimism most of the country is feeling, we’re also considering “what could be bad” in the…
Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and his HBO football comedy Ballers have decided to relocate for Season 3, ditching continued production in Miami in favor of a move to California. Hollywood has promised the show a $8.3 million TV tax incentive for making the move, as well as a few other bells and whistles the Sunshine State just couldn’t match.
Pablo Larraín is having a good year. The Chilean director, Oscar-nominated a few years ago for his 2012 political drama No, has just released Jackie, featuring a striking Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. He is also about to release Neruda, a complex,…
In a profile early this year, the novelist Dana Spiotta told the New York Times, “That’s seductive, being paid attention to.” Several of the films below — those that seduced me — feature pivotal scenes, whether in diners, at picnic tables or at kitchen tables, of one character raptly listening…
I was fortunate enough this year to be at both Sundance and Cannes, so it was something like agony for me to watch the litany of critics and commentators who spent the summer and early fall complaining about the year in film — all while movies such as Manchester by…
In this, the harrowing year of 2016, I could jump into the Oscars talk. I could pick groundbreaking films that reminded me time and again that movies are alive and more vital than ever, like the heartbreaking Moonlight, the soul-stirring Queen of Katwe, the force-of-goodness 13th, the subtle and sweet…
Controversial opinion: Lists are a great way to both organize and digest horrifically large amounts of information. And they’ve never been more relevant than this, the Lord’s year, 2016, in television. There’s just too damn much, and nobody could possibly watch it all — except maybe Scott Bakula on a…
Whenever I tell someone I’ve been binging on Hallmark Christmas movies all day, there’s a certain amount of apology involved. “I know, they’re the worst,” I’ll concede, before the other person has had a chance to say anything. “The one I watched this morning was a real winner.” Usually whomever…
