Theeb Director Naji Abu Nowar on Having His Film Return to Miami

Theeb, a foreign-language film from Jordan, made its South Florida debut during Miami Dade College’s 32nd-annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) earlier this year. During the festival, the film took the screenwriting prize and left audiences — and critics — in awe. Told from the perspective of the nomadic eyes…

Jennifer Lawrence and The Hunger Games Transcend the Blockbuster

With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games began in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…

In The Night Before, Seth Rogen and Company Grow Up — Again

How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…

All Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea Offers Is Location

It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense they were wounded,…

First Jane, Now Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The CW Gets What Young Women Want

We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…

Noé’s Love Has Sex, Beauty, but Too Little Feeling

First things first: Yes, Gaspar Noé’s arthouse sexbomb, Love, quite literally goes off in your face, with an ejaculation closeup 90 minutes in that might have you wiping off your 3D glasses. You might think that’s an impressive provocation, until you recall that every 12-year-old boy in America sees that…

Superb Reporting Drama Spotlight Is a Rallying Cry

Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of…

The 33‘s True Story Works Best When It’s Underground

How do you dramatize the unthinkable? On August 5, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped when the 100-year-old gold and copper mine in which they were working collapsed around them. For weeks, no one knew if they were alive or dead. But 69 days later, after a team of international…

Jules Dassin’s Thriller Rififi Is the Best of All Heist Movies

The best of all heist movies, Jules Dassin’s tough-minded clockwork thriller Rififi, from 1955, is also one of the great films about process, about prepping for and grinding through small challenges, about improvisational teamwork within the framework of a plan, about the satisfaction of the last few cranks of a…

The Best Classic Films Showing in Miami in November

After what can only be described as a totally jam-packed month of classic cinema in October, culminating in a night of way too many movies for anyone’s good, November slows it all down. Here are the goods, which this month will be conveniently split up by location due to the…

Why I’m Still Watching The Muppets

The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…

Spectre Grinds Through Its Plot, but It and Craig Look Great

Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale-gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond picture…

The Peanuts Movie Holds True to Its Inspiration(s)

Yes, it’s 3D computer animation, and yes, it shows us more of the face of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl than you ever thought you would see. But the news, for the most part, is good: The Peanuts Movie is much closer in spirit to Charles Schulz’s half-century comic-strip masterpiece…

Cancer Drama Miss You Already Boasts One of the Year’s Top Scripts

Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke’s cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate. But then Collette, playing a vain patient bereft at losing her hair and her ability to wear seven-inch…

In I Smile Back, Sarah Silverman Succeeds Beyond Comedy

Comedy isn’t the champagne of bottled beers; it’s champagne, period, a delicate and perfect achievement in itself when it works. That’s why it’s frustrating when great comic performers feel compelled to prove themselves in what we so solemnly call dramatic roles. The late, scarily brilliant Robin Williams stumbled into love-me…

Get Wonderfully Lost in Guy Maddin’s The Forbidden Room

Through the ornate fonts, tints, intertitles, scores, acting techniques, and camera tricks that have made his “directed by” credit the ultimate redundancy, Guy Maddin demonstrates in The Forbidden Room that he has forgotten more about silent movies and early talkies than almost anyone else will ever know. And it’s the…