When I was a kid in upstate New York, I’d hear Petula Clark’s “Downtown” on the radio — a song about the promise of glittering lights, “movie shows,” and all the excitement and dazzle adult life had to offer — and revel in the anywhere-but-hereness of it all. That’s not…
Director Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you’re watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie is a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it’s underwhelming as…
Perhaps it’s fitting that a crime drama about constipation should take so long to get going. Directors Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson’s tense true-life Australian drug-trafficking ick-out The Mule opens with a sweaty Ray Jenkins (Sampson) dropping trou and spreading for airport security, his face straining for a blithe cluelessness…
If the universe is infinitely finite, an entity whose mystery is knowable only through an evolving progression of theories and equations, it’s nothing compared to a marriage. Every marriage or long-term partnership is knowable only to the people inside it — and sometimes not even then. The Theory of Everything…
With the first two documentaries in her post–9-11 trilogy — My Country, My Country, a portrait of Iraq under American occupation, and The Oath, which focused on two Guantánamo Bay prisoners — Laura Poitras seemed to be making a bid for the title of film’s most vigilant observer of American…
From the Blue Starlite Drive-in to Shirley’s at Gramps, Nayib Estefan’s Secret Celluloid Society has been rapidly spreading its gospel of cult films to Miami audiences. Its latest endeavor is the After Hours series at Coral Gables Art Cinema, which features late night screenings of special flick events, from the…
Fourteen years ago, Love & Basketball hit theaters, and even though so much time has passed the film still feels fresh. Maybe it’s the great performances from everyone in the cast, especially Sanaa Lathan, or the fact that writer/director Gina Prince-Bythewood has a special talent for depicting characters that are…
In the mid 1990s, self-appointed cultural gatekeepers used to wield Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber as proof of the deterioration of film artistry. Those people hadn’t, of course, actually bothered to see the movie, and thus had no sense of its peculiar, sweet-spirited, un-toilet-trained brilliance. Times have changed,…
Tales of fame and its trappings — and the way they’re never enough to build a life — are as old as show business itself. Maybe for that reason, almost any story about discovering the hollowness of fame is often written off as a cliché. But what’s the difference, really,…
The magnificent dance film Flamenco Flamenco begins, as it must, with a lady in red. Scarlet red, the dress clings to the impossibly lithe body of Sara Baras, Spain’s preeminent female dancer, who stretches her long arms to the sky and then, with a slight hitch of that dress and…
It’s an unwritten rule that we’re supposed to feel most in step with people our own age, as if sharing the same cultural and historical references somehow enables our ability to look into each other’s hearts. So why do we sometimes tumble into deeper friendships with people who are 10…
During a 2009 Daily Show interview with Maziar Bahari, the Canadian-Iranian journalist who, earlier that year, had been imprisoned in Iran for 118 days on espionage charges, Jon Stewart said, “We hear a lot about the banality of evil, but so little about the stupidity of evil.” Or about its…
It’s a special The Daily Show edition of the Voice Film Club podcast, as we talk about Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (starring Steve Carell) and move onto Rosewater, the movie Jon Stewart left The Daily Show for three months in 2013 to direct. Both are in theaters starting November 14. See…
For almost 15 years, the Byron Carlyle Theater has been a neon haltered shell of its former self. Before the projectors went dark in 2001, the 71st street cinema had been a North Beach fixture for decades, standing as the local theater du jour for many, since it opened with…
With a third theater opening this week, and a line-up that’s consistently dedicated to spreading lesser known films, it’s no surprise that O Cinema makes a great home for independent filmmakers. And with that comes the opportunity to introduce South Florida communities to cultures they don’t typically see on screen…
There’s more television today than at any other point in the medium’s history, but there’s a good chance you’re stuck in a TiVo rut. That’s because, with a handful of exceptions, this fall has delivered a truckload of mediocrity and dead-on-arrival trends. (Goodbye, “rom-sit-coms” like the already canceled A to…
There’s so much space in Christopher Nolan’s nearly three-hour intergalactic extravaganza Interstellar that there’s almost no room for people. This is gigantosaurus movie entertainment, set partly in outer space and partly in a futuristic dustbowl America where humans are in danger of dying out, and Nolan — who cowrote the…
Ruben Östlund makes films the way sociologists devise thought experiments: by posing a hypothesis and thinking fully through its consequences. The Swedish director’s previous feature, 2011’s Play, follows a group of black teenagers in Gothenburg as they blithely coerce a trio of affluent white children to hand over their valuables…
The greatest lie of the past 80 years: “Never again.” At this moment, Omar al-Bashir, the world’s wickedest despot, is free not only to rule the Sudan but also to make diplomatic visits to international allies — China, Saudi Arabia — despite the calls of the International Criminal Court (ICC)…
Quick, name the most expensive housing market in America. If you said New York, Los Angeles, or Miami, you couldn’t be farther from the truth — literally. Each is more than 1,500 miles away from Williston, North Dakota, a monochrome town you can drive end-to-end in 15 minutes. In four…
Imagine if nerdy Clark Kent didn’t have to remove his glasses and pocket protector to save the world. Then imagine him as fat and sweet as a marshmallow. Meet Big Hero 6’s Baymax, Disney’s new cuddly champion: a waddling, inflatable health-care companion who can sense your pulse, diagnose disease, and,…
A newly renovated cinema house in North Beach is ready for its close-up. Once owned by Wometco and then Regal Cinemas, the Byron Carlyle, named after the avenues that sandwiched it when it first opened in 1968, will reopen Friday under the direction of O Cinema with the Michael Keaton…
