Knowing full-well that Miami can never get enough films, The Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) brings back their Fall film event with a make-over of sorts, and it’s a damn good one. GEMS offers up fourteen feature films exclusively at MDC’s Tower Theater Miami, among other events, to satiate filmgoers…
There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…
Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city-dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks to the country to spend a week with her best friend,…
A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia to Maine, accompanied by an…
The first famous tennis player was King Louis X of France. Nicknamed Louis the Quarreler for his domestic politics, meaning he was likely a real pain to the ref, King Louis is renowned for two facts in athletic lore: He invented the indoor tennis court, and, after a hard, hot…
There’s a lot to laugh at in Daniel Lee’s faux-historical Silk Road adventure Dragon Blade, not least of which is the sight of Adrien Brody as corrupt Roman consul Tiberius wearing a tumble of raven-colored beauty-queen curls and purring in a phony British thespian’s accent. With his blue crushed-velvet cape…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor, and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
There’s a strain of science fiction writing that evokes a chilly kind of coziness, usually by introducing us to individuals or small groups of people who have found their way to the country in the hope of escaping encroaching doom. John Wyndham’s bleak, beautiful 1951 novel The Day of the…
This mean and vigorous men’s adventure pulp throwback has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret seeing. The trailers, teasing the story of a toothsome American family hunted by peasant-rebels in…
Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker’s rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly, run down the worst and best of the movies they saw this summer, which as summers go, wasn’t so terrible! Among the best performances were those by Sam Elliott, wonderful in two movies,…
It’s been over a year since the first time I met Nayib Estefan in the back room of Gramps, just as he was starting up Shirley’s and telling me just how badly he wanted to bring classic films to Miami through Secret Celluloid Society (SCS). To think that over that…
Sometime in the 1980s, Marlon Brando had his face digitized, presumably as a way of leaving just a bit more of himself after his departure from this planet. As we see it in Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, that speaking, moving hologram looks like a cross between George…
Remake The Graduate today and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, “Startups.” Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly that people may not notice.
“You could make five different N.W.A movies. We made the one we wanted to make.” That’s director F. Gary Gray during an audience Q&A after a recent screening of Straight Outta Compton, the long-awaited N.W.A movie. In our review, Amy Nicholson writes that there’s much more to the group’s story:…
The influence of David Fincher’s Se7en on Hollywood has been profound; from 8mm to Minority Report. Now you will find that influence in a starkly serious detective story from Spain called Marshland (La isla minima), which will have its U.S. theatrical premiere in South Florida this Friday, after first premiering…
The world of film noir is peopled with melancholy men trying to do the right thing even when they don’t quite know what the right thing is. Always — always — they fall for the wrong girl. Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins — the highly principled, if confused, heart of Carol…
Promising and disappointing all at once, Jon Watts’ back-roads thriller Cop Car heralds the arrival of a significant director, one adept not just at the usual action and suspense but also at the fleet, affecting depiction of lives as they’re actually lived. In the opening scenes, the camera glides alongside…
Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive, and horrific and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We’re the…
In a world gone mad for superhero movies, what chance does the light spy caper have? Audiences will put total faith in a guy wearing a red metal suit, but the soft woolen folds of the bespoke kind barely register. When a whole city can be blasted to smithereens thanks…
