The humanist virtues of John Sayles are readily apparent in the first scenes of Go For Sisters, his low-key border-crossing roadtrip mystery. Straight off, the writer-director-novelist treats us to two knotty, compelling monologues, a pair of showstoppers in the first 10 minutes, each delivered by characters you don’t see in…
The late Paul Walker practiced the kind of manly American acting that often doesn’t look like acting at all. In movie after movie, many of them of the fast and/or furious variety, Walker performed the difficult trick of seeming to really be the apple-pie tough guys he played. In those…
Someday there will be a serious academic study on Tyler Perry, the battered and sexually abused child who legally changed his first name at 16 to distance himself from his estranged father and grew rich playing a caricature of his mother in pantyhose and a dress, like a sass-talking Norman…
For the fourth consecutive year, Miami will be represented at the Sundance Film Festival, arguably the nation’s most prestigious film event, by the filmmakers of the Borscht Corporation. Sundance announced its short film program yesterday, including Yearbook by Miami filmmaker Bernardo Britto. The five-minute animated short will mark Britto’s first…
2013 was a good year to be bad. This year’s best villains weren’t just goons with guns — although there were a few great examples of those. (Here’s looking at you, Sean Penn.) We also hissed at slave-owners, inventors, seducers, producers, and a couple amazing women who left an impression…
The big problem with pinup queen Bettie Page — maybe the only problem — is that her image inspires so many easy bromides about how she made sex seem fun and playful and how she’s a great role model for modern women who want to feel comfortable with their sexuality…
Blending cliché-prone genres — disease-of-the-week tearjerker, marital melodrama, musical — into an unwieldy but distinctive hybrid, Belgian director Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown holds you even as it flies off the tracks. The Flemish-language film revolves around banjo player Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and tattoo artist Elise (Veerle Baetens),…
Photo by Hilary Bronwyn Gayle – © 2012 – OB Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.Download this week’s Voice Film Club podcast before you get on the plane or maybe listen to it on your way to a restaurant where you’ll eat turkey and get a little drunk on red wine.”I…
Beekeepers in More Than Honey.This year saw its share of incredible documentaries, but in 2013 the stand-outs are films that help flesh out the way we see the world. Below are fifteen docs we suggest seeing, from the grisly to uplifting. Click on the name of the film to read…
Once upon a time — the 1980s — you could walk into a movie theater any day of the year, plop down a few bucks, and watch one man kick another man’s ass. Not every action flick was great, but most were good enough, the film equivalent of pizza. Back…
Some movies come barreling out of their caves like armies on the sociocultural warpath, self-consciously defining themselves as psychographic events, marking The Way Things Are Now and becoming part of history in the process. Given the ambition, we should embrace these rare explosions when they happen, even more so now…
The great sins of the 20th century are already too many to list, but let us note one more: the abduction of infants from mothers deemed unworthy or undesirable by governments and religious institutions. Thousands of children were kidnapped from leftist parents during Argentina’s and Spain’s respective dictatorships, while children…
A favorite pastime of those who love Asian film is to carp about Hollywood’s annoying tendency to lay claim to and defile their favorites. But Spike Lee’s Oldboy is the remake that came too late, so benign and unmemorable that not even people who loved Park Chan-wook’s 2003 original will…
The breadth of director Shaul Schwarz’s documentary Narco Cultura is staggering. A hybrid of hard investigative journalism and incisive cultural criticism, the film at its core is about definitions of success and power, and how today those terms are shaped by the shared forces of poverty and celebrity culture…
Thirteen-year-old Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse is flicking paper airplanes across the windowless conference room of the Ritz-Carlton Miami Beach when Cultist walks in to meet her and British director Brian Percival. Percival, best known as the Emmy-winning director of many episodes of Downton Abbey, and Nélisse are at the end…
Through the soaring windows of the Mandarin Oriental Miami, it’s hard not to notice the blue skies and matching azure water. Most people find Miami’s beachy, serene views relaxing. But for fans of The Hunger Games, the vacation vista could just as easily conjure images of blister-forming nerve gas, vicious…
It had to happen: There’s so much voiceover narration in today’s movies, so much needless verbal play-by-play, that it was only a matter of time before somebody made a picture narrated by that life of the party himself, Death. The Grim Reaper delivers the opening monologue of The Book Thief,…
In May 1962, a cease-fire was declared with colonial Algeria, marking the first time in 23 years that France was not at war. Filmmaker Chris Marker and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme took to the streets of Paris that month with a handheld camera (a new model also used by Jean Rouch…
It says something that two of the biggest sensations in young adult literature over the past 10 years have featured heroines who keep more than one guy on the line at a time. No longer do the genre’s bright young women sit around waiting for one Mr. Right to notice…
When Claire Denis’ blood-and-lust-filled reverie Trouble Every Day, her most maligned project to date, premiered in New York in 2002, it opened on only one postage-stamp-size screen. Now comes the chance to consider anew — or, like this writer, see for the first time — a hypnotic, unsettling work by…
Imagine an alternate history for Vince Vaughn. What if, 18 years ago, instead of rehearsing Swingers during the day and sampling Los Angeles’ starlets at night, he channeled his sexual energy into masturbating for cash at a sperm bank? He could have become Delivery Man’s David Wozniak, father of 533…
For all its nasty twists, the biggest shock in Spike Lee’s remake of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (opening November 27) hits in the movie’s first minutes — during the credits. “A Spike Lee Film,” a title card reads, a first for any of Lee’s features. Jungle Fever, He Got Game, Inside…
