The first thing to say about Rogue One is that it might be the most visually splendid Star Wars movie to date — with its mist-covered mountains, its tsunamis of dust and fire, its X-wing fighters blazing through rainswept nights. I’ve never been a big fan of director Gareth Edwards…
Here’s a promise few movies can make. If you sink two hours into Collateral Beauty now, it’s guaranteed that for the rest of your life, when conversation stalls, you can save the night by asking, “Did you ever see that movie where Will Smith plays an ad executive so shut…
The cussedness of La La Land is almost enough to recommend it. Damien Chazelle’s sumptuous tribute to romantics trying to keep lit the fire of a guttering culture is defiantly old-fashioned in form and style. It is, among other things, a throwback to the great MGM musicals of the Gene…
The next step on Moonlight’s road to the Oscars played out this morning when the Golden Globes announced its 2017 nominations. The film, based on a play by Miami native Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by fellow Miamian Barry Jenkins, earned six nods from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, including…
Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival is back with their 34th edition this March and today organizers announced a double dose of excitement for audience members who want more diverse work. Not only is the Google Seminar Series on Gender & Racial Gaps in Film & Tech that launched last…
Welcome to Miami, Landmark Theatres. After a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason at the Shops of Merrick Park during a VIP preview reception Thursday, the anticipated grand opening the following day of the Landmark at Merrick Park had to be pushed back a week because of “technical issues.”
As praise for the Miami-made film Moonlight continues to build, its filmmakers and actors gathered at Miami Beach Cinematheque Thursday for a local look inside its creation. Actors Alex Hibbert and Jaden Piner, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, and director Barry Jenkins discussed the film in a Speaking in Cinema conversation led by Borscht Film Festival cofounder Lucas Leyva, resulting in one of the most revealing conversations about the film to date.
Incorporated comes on like the kind of TV show you think you have to pay close attention to. There’s more consideration of climate change in the tense Syfy dystopian thriller than in all four-and-a-half hours of this fall’s presidential debates. As the series opens, stern white titles on a black…
Filmmaker Faren Humes delivers work that feels relevant and necessary. Her short film Our Rhineland, about two sisters who took on the Third Reich as it rendered mixed-race Germans sterile, has earned her a Director’s Guild of America Student Film Award and an Academy of Television Arts & Sciences College Television Award…
Always the first festival that cinephiles anticipate in the new year, the Miami Jewish Film Festival returns this January. For its 20th year, the festival will present 64 films from 20 countries while hosting 50 filmmakers and special guests throughout South Florida.
Borscht Corp., the nonprofit organization that makes your favorite short films in and about Miami, has a lot of exciting news for the start of 2017. First up? For the seventh year in a row, Borscht-commissioned works are playing at the ever-growing Sundance Film Festival in January. Better yet: Borscht…
It’s December, which means it’s time to curl up in front of the TV in a fetal position and pray for 2017. Since this year has been Satan’s masturbatory fantasy, we deserve to glue our eyelids open and soak in the sweet, sweet escapism. And on January 1st, fortified by…
The great Mariah Carey once sang, “All I want for Christmas is classic movies.” OK, she might not have said those exact words, but who doesn’t want some good old-school movies to check out during the holidays? Miami has plenty for you this month, so get ready.
One reason why Isabelle Huppert makes suffering so compelling onscreen is her sheer … well, “unflappability” isn’t quite the right word. It’s a kind of ironic distance, perhaps: The actress can convey curiosity, bewilderment and coolness all at once, even as she deals with the most agonizing of circumstances. But…
Watching Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s mesmerizing sci-fi arthouse stunner, Evolution, I thought of the paintings of surrealist Rene Magritte — a few in particular: The Collective Invention (1934) and The Human Condition diptych (1933, 1935). The former features a creature — the bottom limbs of a woman and the body of a…
In October, 200 coffee shops across the United States and Canada were made into Luke’s Diner for a day to promote the new revival of Gilmore Girls. No special signings or souvenirs — just the regular drink in a commemorative sleeve, served by the usual barista in a branded apron,…
It’s impossible not to think of the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park while watching Bryan Bertino’s chilling and succinctly titled The Monster. You remember: It’s dark, and the rains have started. The Jeeps have stalled en route to their destination. The kids are in one car, adults in the other,…
Look, Shia LaBeouf was approximately the 27th worst thing in that last Indiana Jones movie, and his intense-yet-distracted turns in the Transformers series aren’t legit strikes against him. Would you have turned down all that money to be posed by Michael Bay for a couple months every few years? Now,…
Miss Sloane opens with a clever gambit: Jessica Chastain’s face fills the screen in a tight close-up as she talks about strategy, breaking the fourth wall. From its opening minutes, the audience is put at the mercy of a charismatic figure and forced to piece together what she might represent…
Eventually, there will be so many films about a sullen or damaged man returning to his provincial town to face the demons of his past that Netflix will make a separate category for them. At their worst, these movies are navel-gazing vanity projects for their writers and directors (Cameron Crowe,…
It’s been five years since multimedia artist/filmmaker Jillian Mayer went viral with the 63-second short film I Am Your Grandma. The video has screened at many respectable film festivals and exhibited at scores of notable art galleries. It will finally make its official Art Basel Miami Beach premiere during the annual fair’s 2016 outdoor short-films program, Best Dressed Chicken in Town.
Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…
