Borscht Corp. Alumni Get Into Sundance With Five New Films

When it comes to Miami indie film production, everyone knows Borscht Corp. has been on a roll. Yesterday, the Sundance Film Festival  announced that it has accepted an unprecedented five films from the filmmaking collective to premiere at next month’s festival in Park City, Utah. Four short films and a…

Wim Wenders’ Every Thing Will Be Fine Is a Movie Gone Wrong

A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008’s Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders’s latest (written…

The Best Classic Films Showing in Miami in December

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays here in Miami, inside and out. Although it is still not particularly cold weather-wise, hopefully the theaters will crank the air to 30 and whip up a snowstorm during a film. December is here and so are a bundle of classic…

Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s Best in Years, Looks to the Ancients

Oh, Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…

Stallone Won’t Let Creed Escape Rocky‘s Shadow

The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…

Migrant Drama Brooklyn Reveals Saoirse Ronan as One of the Greats

Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…

Old Ways Meet the New Reality in the Wondrous The Wonders

Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…

Trumbo Honors a Blacklisted Screenwriter With Drama He Would Have Cut

Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…

Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan Enjoys Its Second Coming-Out Gala

There are movies that aren’t for everyone, and then there are movies that ought to be stamped with a “Caution: Not for Everyone” disclaimer. Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is not only about rich teenagers — a common one-note villain in most American comedies. It’s also about old-money Manhattan teenagers…

Jessica Jones Is the Best Onscreen Drama Marvel Has Ever Made

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…