In celebration of Halloween, the Secret Celluloid Society planned an evening full of movies picked with the plan to keep you up all night. Starting at 11:30 p.m. at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, The Thing was up first, followed by Night of the Demons, Eraserhead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre —…
Back in 2011, a small film made with a group of Miami talent premiered at the 28th annual Miami International Film Festival, and now, years later, Magic City Memoirs is making its debut on Netflix. Due to some legal issues, director and writer Aaron Salgado couldn’t go into details on the…
Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery, and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even…
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia’s next president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an offscreen TV interviewer (the film’s awkward framing device) to…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
Completing a trifecta of recent cinema (after Masters of Sex and The Stanford Prison Experiment) suddenly fascinated with the social-science lab experiments of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Experimenter is as cool as a grad student clamping electrodes onto a test monkey. One of our lowest-profile indie-film treasures, director Michael Almereyda never…
Lenny Abrahamson’s shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism. Seven years ago, a man (Sean Bridgers) snatched 17-year-old Joy (Brie Larson) and stashed her in his backyard shed. Two years later, she bore their son. The door stayed locked. Now 5, Jack…
The most effective scene in James Vanderbilt’s brisk, outraged Truth is one that will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a room where editors and reporters are breaking down an investigative story. The reporters — here, 60 Minutes researchers played by Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and Topher…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind had tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she…
This Jem is less a movie than an open-source brand launch: If you’re young and down or bullied or disconnected from the life around you, you could always slap on some glitter and film yourself singing as the cartoon-rock queen Jem. Aubrey Peeples, playing the singer, even gets a sort…
Sure, you can blame the aliens, the gophers, the monkeys and the fridge. But even without all those, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Harrumphing of the Whatsit likely wouldn’t have worked. Its director, you see, no longer finds it edifying to dream up new ways to kill America’s historical enemies…
Despite the versatility of his subjects, documentary filmmaker Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt acknowledges there’s a common thread throughout each of his films. “My films explore compelling characters presented in an observational style. I’m interested in unraveling an event as it’s happening, as a character is going for something they really want.” Perlmutt’s…
It has been eight years since Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s last movie, The Flight of the Red Balloon. Though that film was told through the perspective of a Chinese student living in Paris, his return to filmmaking couldn’t be more heavily rooted in Chinese culture with an intimate wuxia story…
Acting as a preview to the yearly Miami International Film Festival put on by Miami Dade College being held in March 2016, GEMS boasts a small collection of films screening at the Tower Theater daily starting today through Sunday. Compared to last year’s MIFFecito mini-fest, things look promising. The lineup,…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
When he was a young boy, Stephen Bogart remembers fondly a trip he took with his father, Humphrey Bogart, on a boat around the Catalina Islands in California. Stephen had a small plush skunk toy he used to play with by putting inside a crab trap cage. One night, he…
On Tuesday night, the Miami Jewish Film Festival presented a sold-out screening of Rhonda Mitrani’s Cuba Mia at Temple Moses. The film, which documents the story of a group of Cuban-born U.S. Jews who return to the Cuba of their childhood to find it both familiar and changed, also included a…
Acting as a preview to the yearly film festival being held in March 2016, GEMS boasts a small collection of films screening at the Tower Theater daily starting Thursday through Sunday. “GEMS is the name we came up with to best represent the personality of our new fall festival event,”…
Quick! Name the movie in which Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the…
A super naturalistic study in class, bureaucracy, and censorial stupidity, Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature, Court plants viewers in the plastic chairs of an Indian court of law as 69-year-old protest singer Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) is tried for a crime he didn’t commit by lawyers and a judge speaking a…
New this year to the Revolt Music Conference was the addition of their first annual Revolt Film Festival. While the music portion took place at the Fontainebleau this weekend, the film festival screened its inaugural five shorts at the Lyric Theater in Overtown on Sunday. The festival was hosted by…
