As Bob McCall in The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays a regular Joe who turns into an eye-gouging, brain-drilling nightmare for Boston’s Russian mob. At first Washington “toodles about a Home Depot-like store, helping customers, decked out in New Balance shoes and jeans so last-century you’ll be looking for pleats,” writes…
If you thought Miami movie-going couldn’t get better than a plastic cup of wine at Paragon Grove theater, think again. Soon, Brickell will have its very own luxury dine-in cinema, courtesy of Mexico City-based Cinemex. Developer Swire Properties Inc. announced this week that Cinemex will open its first cinema in…
Plenty of filmmakers have wildly imaginative careers, but none have been quite as playful and engaging as former Monty Python troupe member Terry Gilliam. And O Cinema Wynwood, known for picking intriguing films and presenting unexpected but deserving classics, is exactly the theater primed to explore such a filmmaker’s varied…
The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower, and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film. If the German Expressionists were skilled at stop-motion animation, they’d have already made it. This is cartoon Caligari, a fable set on a…
“There’s no avoiding trouble in this world if you want to make something,” Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch says about making his first feature film. “But it’s worth it.” And God Help the Girl, the musical he wrote and directed, certainly took a lot of toil to become the…
Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama with the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…
Before its regular-Joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…
Tim Sutton’s Memphis plays like a vaunted director’s greatest folly. That’s a compliment. Here’s a film of the moments — lyric and rough-hewn, bawdy and elliptical — a great storyteller hopes might enrich a memorable story. (Or, in the case of a Heaven’s Gate, bloat a weak one to bursting.)…
Terry Gilliam is a gifted, ambitious filmmaker who, sadly, may now be more famous for being misunderstood and underfunded than he is for actually making movies. The Zero Theorem isn’t likely to reverse that equation. In this half-squirrely, half-torpid sci-fi adventure, Christoph Waltz, with a shaved head and a face…
Most people know Rich Wilkerson Jr., a junior preacher at Miami Garden’s Trinity Church, from the endless Internet coverage of the Kanye West and Kim Kardashian wedding. Amid the shower of news surrounding the nuptials, Buzzfeed and other sites kept swooning over the surprisingly hot man of God who married…
Jorge “Jokes” Yanes is one of the most respected filmmakers in Miami. Almost ten years before Youtube, when the TV news was still editing on Beta tapes, Yanes built his own computerized editing system in his family’s home from Chinese parts bought in Doral. He’s done every job on every…
“There’s no avoiding trouble in this world if you want to make something,” Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch says about making his first feature film. “But it’s worth it.” And God Help the Girl, the delightful musical he wrote and directed, certainly took a lot of work to become…
Let’s face it, James Franco’s Child of God, a movie about a lonely man living in the Tennessee wilderness who takes up necrophilia and murder, is a difficult movie to enjoy. However, that does not make it a film to be reviled. The film, based on an early Cormac McCarthy…
Kevin Smith has made some unique, cult-embraced films in his day: Clerks, Dogma, and Chasing Amy to name a few. After a brief hiatus from the filmmaking world, the jersey-wearing mega-geek is back with a dark comedy about a walrus, Tusk. The plotline is a tad more complicated than just…
Is America ready for a ski trip to Miami? Fresh powder is about in hit TNT like a brick to the face. The TV show based on the movie Cocaine Cowboys, currently being called “Untitled Cocaine Pilot” has officially been greenlit for a pilot by the network. It’s being brought…
Darkness. Vision is consumed by darkness and the sound of knobs turning and metal clashing. Light flickers in, and things start to come into perspective. It’s a lift; something is being carried up — but to where? The screeching of a pulley is joined by the panting of a young…
If director/co-writer James Franco had retitled his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 1973 novel Child of God to A Man’s Love for a Corpse, he’d have a more honest film on his hands — not to mention a purposefully campy one. Even if he’d aimed a little higher, to keep in…
“I’ve spent my whole life playing it safe,” whines Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), the middle-class milquetoast at the center of This Is Where I Leave You. Yes, well, so has director Shawn Levy, but on the basis of his latest vacuous trifle he has no apparent intention, as Altman does,…
They’ve done it at last: made a Liam Neeson-stomps-some-ass flick where, as the credits roll, there’s more stuff to be glad you saw than Neeson himself. Based on one of those Lawrence Block novels that’s pretty smart but also too invested in the mechanics of rape and torture, the movie’s…
In two minutes, the Beatles captured the empty life of sad singleton Eleanor Rigby. Director Ned Benson is devoting three films to her namesake — a New York divorcée (Jessica Chastain) — and this first entry, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, barely explains her at all. Wan and adrift,…
Martin Amis once wrote that the literary critic must “proceed by quotation” — that the quotation, however vigorously embellished, remains the book reviewer’s “only hard evidence” in the case for or against a work. Film criticism is denied even this meager luxury. For the writer, film’s nonverbal qualities are always…
Kevin Smith is a bright guy who over the years has become a little too taken with his own persona, his own jokes, his own cult following — it’s the filmmaker’s equivalent of getting high on your own supply. No matter how awkwardly pontifical or ill-shapen his movies have gotten…
