So you heard about a tropical storm with South Florida in its path, and you performed your annual hurricane ritual: stocking up on water and booze, filling your gas tank, making sure you have plenty to read. And then Chantal dissipated out in the Caribbean, and you thought you were…
If the great god of movies, whatever slippery Mount Olympus of money he resides on, decrees that summer is the time for larger-than-life 3-D blockbusters, Guillermo del Toro may as well make one. His Pacific Rim is summer entertainment with a pulse. The effects are so overscaled and lavish as…
“You use big words to say simple things,” Augustine, an illiterate kitchen maid, says to the esteemed doctor treating her for the distinctly female malady “hysteria.” This would be a show of boilerplate feistiness in most films, but in writer-director Alice Winocour’s Augustine, it stands as a subtler, more complex…
A good talker can be a mixed blessing for the documentary biographer. Tabloid’s Joyce McKinney, for instance, the beauty queen alleged to have abducted and raped a Mormon missionary in the 1970s, proved hypnotically chatty. Every nutty tangent and girlish inflection, as presented by Errol Morris, contributed to a portrait…
We spend so much time complaining about the current state of mainstream grown-up cinema — all comic books, sequels, and comic book sequels — we sometimes forget how formulaic animation has also become, relying too heavily on rapidly outdated pop-culture gags and hoary “be true to yourself” storylines. For every…
Watching the documentary Hey Bartender is like spending a night at a good bar: It’s fun, easygoing, and lasts just a little longer than it should. And the conversation, while delightful in the moment, often seems banal the next morning. It’s clear that director Douglas Tirola is passionate about cocktails…
Michael Cera is growing up. It may be hard to picture, as at one point it seemed as if baby-faced Cera could forever play the awkward teenage boy next door. But in the last few months, other than a recent return to his Arrested Development roots, Cera has left behind…
With an offhand precision that suggests he might prove one of his generation’s major actors, Michael Cera lays bare two specific human weaknesses in writer-director Sebastián Silva’s altered-states/group-dynamics road drama Crystal Fairy—weaknesses you’ll likely recognize from life rather than from other movies. The first is the pushy, wheedling neediness of…
Nicholas Winton, a comfortable young banker in 1930s England, could have, like most of his countrymen before World War II, carried on with his life. Instead, made aware of Hitler’s movements, he took it upon himself to whisk as many Jewish children as possible out of Czechoslovakia, to be fostered…
Not lazy in the sense that he has no ambition, or doesn’t want to work hard to maintain his status as America’s big-screen comedy king. But in the sense that Sandler has built an empire by doing the same things with the same people, over and over again. That sameness,…
Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story, a documentary by Miami-based filmmaker Brad Bernstein, opens in theaters across the country this summer. But Miami got to see the film months in advance when it screened at the Miami International Film Festival earlier this year. We spoke to Bernstein…
Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse? It’s OK, I guess. I mean, if you’re into a ton of color and evil internet queens and the idea of a multidimensional space prince playing for the Miami Heat. But what if you’re looking for something a little more serious, a little…
It was like Flashback Friday on last night’s episode of Dexter. “Every Silver Lining” opened with an old video of a handsomely dressed Harry talking to a hidden-from-view Dr. Vogel. Harry recounts the first time he snuck Dexter onto a crime scene. Dexter was only ten years old when he…
Midnight’s Children: The Gist of Salman Rushdie’s Novel
How to Make Money Selling Drugs Is Smart, Funny, Tough-Minded
The great movie westerns are about honor, dignity, the majesty of the landscape. But they’re also about beautiful men, charismatic, sometimes dangerous-looking demigods like Robert Ryan, James Stewart, Franco Nero, Randolph Scott, and, of course, John Wayne. The Lone Ranger has Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, the former a long-legged…
Admit it: Redemption is boring. We think we want characters to “grow” and “change,” but really, it’s the people around us in real life — people who, say, loudly pick their teeth in restaurants, or walk too slowly in public thoroughfares — who need revamping. (We ourselves, of course, need…
Title: White House Down How Many Times Have We Seen the White House Destroyed on Film?: If you mean, the royal “we,” then seven: WHD, Superman 2, Mars Attacks!, Earth vs the Flying Saucers, 2012, Independence Day, and Olympus Has Fallen. Rating Using Random Objects Relevant to the Film: Two-and-a…
Crockett and Tubbs, together again? It’s true. Thanks to a partnership between NBCUniversal Television and Lion Forge Comics, Miami Vice is making a comeback. But this time, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas are headed to your iPad, not your television. The classic ’80s hit is one of five vintage…
Elijah Wood is a Maniac.The original Maniac hit theaters in 1980, and quickly became a slasher classic by heralding a new era in on-screen depravity. The grimy, gritty film about a serial killer who scalps women and collects mannequins famously depicted a close-up of a shotgun blast to the head,…
The season eight premiere of Dexter aired on Showtime on June 30 over here in the states, but in the UK, its airing date is set for Sunday, July 7, on FOX. The beginning of the end is certainly a cause for celebration, and there’s no better way to celebrate…
As Burn Notice approaches the end of its final season, its former home is also facing extinction. Yep, it’s ka-boom time for the Coconut Grove Convention Center. exMiami reports that “Miami officials are already processing a demolition permit” for the building, which could be approved within a matter of weeks,…
