Though the Miami International Film Festival’s opening night is still a month away, today’s the day that probably makes festival director Jaie Laplante most restless: the day tickets go on sale to members. “I’m anxious to see how they respond to the program,” he said speaking via phone, earlier this…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from 13 nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996 when they housed the server for their new…
For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-aged gay man falls in love with a 16-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage à…
Claude Lanzmann built Shoah, his nine-hour, 1985 Holocaust documentary, from more than 350 hours of footage — interviews, staged scenes, silent European landscapes as seen from a passing train, their secrets reborn in tender shades of green. One interview, with the only surviving former chairman of a Czech ghetto’s Nazi-appointed…
A grim and hilarious hallucination in monochrome, Ben Wheatley’s small-budget historical freak-out A Field in England ticks madly between unities-honoring classical drama, language-drunk existentialism, cock-brandishing Elizabethan ribaldry, and the muskets-and-sorcery madness of some as yet unconceived Vertigo comics series, one where the old ball-and-powder somehow has anachronistic power to blow…
Greetings from the 64th annual Berlin Film Festival, where it’s a surprisingly balmy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). The weather here may not be business as usual, but the festival looks promising — the competition includes films by Alain Resnais, Lou Ye, Yoji Yamada, and Claudia Llosa (whose odd…
How retrograde are many of the core tenets of the Disney princess? Consider this: My daughter owns a book called Snow White’s Secret, in which Disney’s royal archetype reveals her devilish hidden life: When the Dwarfs are working at the mine, she sneaks into their cottage and joyfully cleans the…
Miami New Times’ Mastermind Awards honors the city’s most inspiring creatives. This year, we received more than 100 submissions, which our staff narrowed to an elite group of 30. We’ll be profiling those honorable mentions, and eventually the finalists, in the weeks to come. This year’s three Mastermind Award winners…
Philip Seymour Hoffman 1967 – 2014 A favorite pastime of critics and serious filmgoers, perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one, is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always actors. There’s no such…
Come February, Sundance is making its way from the snow-capped mountains of Utah to the sunny shores of Miami. On February 15, the creative institute — along with the Miami Filmmakers Collective and the Knight Foundation — is hosting New Frontier Flash Lab, a forum dedicated to schooling attendees on…
Early this month, we learned that Guy Fieri was casting for the second season of his new TV show, and we realized we forgot something: Guy has a new TV show! Guy has a new TV show much of the time, but it’s not like us to simply ignore a…
It used to be that if you wanted to get inside a movie, you’d have to ring Marlon Brando’s doorbell and then quickly hide in a sandwich on his doorstep. From there, it was a waiting game. Technological improvements have led to a new kind of filmmaking far more interactive…
We’ve entered an age in which people have no idea how old they are. Fifty-year-olds lament, “I still feel 30 in my mind,” and sometimes dress like it. Some 30-year-olds may cling to the destructive habits of their 20s, but plenty more march dutifully into full-on family-and-career- building mode, perhaps…
Quick, somebody check Jason Reitman’s house to see if the real man has been turned into dust by a body snatcher. Though his name is on the poster, it’s impossible to believe that the sardonic boy wonder of Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and Young Adult would direct this stilted…
“We won’t make the world a better place, but at least we won’t make it worse,” says Franciszek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop) to his younger brother, Józef (Maciej Stuhr), near the climax of Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath. That stark cynicism permeates Pasikowski’s unsettling historical drama. The story is simple — two siblings…
Audaciously overcooked in its fussy grandeur and telegraphed plot twists, Cinema Paradiso writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore’s obsessive-quest drama strains toward being a thriller under Ennio Morricone’s strident score. Geoffrey Rush is on the money as hoity-toity art auctioneer Virgil Oldman, whose auction-block witticisms and Sherlock-worthy ability to deduce centuries-old forgeries impress…
While our ingenues scurry toward teen best sellers and David O. Russell flicks, here’s the next generation of talented leading men swaggering into a dude-bro Sex and the City. At night, best friends played by Zac Efron, Miles Teller, and Michael B. Jordan — aka the player, the goof, and…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, this paper’s film critics kick things off with something of a “potpourri segment,” to borrow a phrase from Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl. Echoing a common sentiment in the movie world, Scherstuhl describes the month of January as a “grim, featureless landscape…that long,…
It’s hard out there for a Miami Bravolebrity. The Magic City’s Real Housewives franchise is one the Bravo network’s newest, launched in 2011 as a rebranding of the failed series Miami Social, and ever since, it’s been struggling to achieve the same kind of viewership as more successful series, like…
With 30 years of festivals in its past, the Miami International Film Festival will mark the start of its fourth decade with some changes. It’s been a gradual growth process to bigger and better things since festival director Jaie Laplante took the helm of the festival in 2011. “Last year…
For Robert Redford, Sundance’s opening day was a bummer. He woke up to learn the Academy had snubbed him for a (deserved) Best Actor nod for the sparse yachting drama All Is Lost, and had to spend his typically triumphant morning press conference swatting down questions about being sad. Luckily…
