Young people are lovely in ways they can’t comprehend until years later. Yesterday’s haircut straight out of Scooby-Doo becomes tomorrow’s despondent comb-over. With the onset of varicose veins, the pale, dimpled legs you once hated now seem in memory not so far off from the lily stems of Botticelli’s Venus…
5/31: Now You See Me: Action filmmaker Louis Leterrier’s output is all over the map, from the fitfully delightful Transporter 2 to that irredeemable Clash of the Titans remake. His latest sounds pretty dopey — the FBi tries to stop a group of bank-robbing magicians — but Leterrier, the director…
Some things are charming about European films that ape Hollywood, the same way that seeing yourself reflected through a funhouse mirror can be. The sentiments aren’t quite as saccharine. The obnoxious characters are a touch nastier. Some subplots aren’t tidily resolved. Yet despite those deviations, the gist is essentially the…
Post Tenebras Lux Is Confusing but Pretty
A film seemingly produced only because it boasts enough sizable roles to entice multiple stars, Craig Zisk’s The English Teacher reveals that a respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn’t enough to generate a single laugh. Introduced by a stuffy female British narrator as a spinster with no marriage prospects,…
Miami audiences saw Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke at the Borscht Film Festival in 2011. Sundance Film Festival viewers checked it out in 2012. And now, Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer have unleashed it on the rest of the world, as part of a series of online film…
Memorial Day Weekend is over, which means it’s time to start thinking of how you will recuperate from your three-day overconsumption of alcohol and MSGs. It’s no secret that one of the preferred ways to recover from a well-celebrated MDW is to vegetate on the couch and watch a hit…
Ladies and gentlemen–anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug–step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an “only-in-France aging cream.” If sun…
Before this week, the films of New York writer/director Noah Baumbach threatened to pigeonhole him as a grim observer of embittered human behavior. Then the 43-year-old invited 29-year-old actress Greta Gerwig to co-write a script with him. Frances Ha, the result that opens in Miami today, pitches a shimmering curveball…
New York is a cruel and beautiful place, just as 27 is a cruel and beautiful age. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig plays a woman who’s feeling the weight of both. Frances is an aspiring dancer who has reached the age when “aspiring” really means not cutting it. Life with…
Fast & Furious 6 Is Sublime Dumb Play
The Hangover Part III Punches Down
Pietà Is an Intriguing, Phsychosexually Twisted Tale
In Renoir, a languorous look at the last days of the storied painter, we get a view of the artist at odds with a blue-haired lady’s notion of her favorite impressionist. It’s a pivotal moment of Renoir family history, with father and son both taking creative and sexual inspiration from…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro—freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies—is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World War II America. He’s a veteran, but he’s treated…
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
Paradise: Love Vacations in Other People’s Misery
Ladies and gentlemen—anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug—step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an “only-in-France aging cream.” If sun…
Expectations here in Cannes were high—or at least semi-high—for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, in which Kristin Scott Thomas and Ryan Gosling play a mother-son duo with what might politely be called unresolved issues. Gosling’s Julian has always played second fiddle to his older brother, Billy (Tom Burke)—the two…
Epic Charms, but in the Most Traditional Manner
Justin Lin may strike some as out of place in the pantheon of contemporary auteurs. The Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, best known for having directed Fast Five and its sequel, Fast & Furious 6, makes unabashedly populist blockbusters for mainstream audiences—hardly the purview of a “serious” artist. His films, wafer thin…
It’s summertime, which means Miami’s 100% humidity, unoccupied children, and epic blockbusters will have us hightailing it to the movies on the regular. We can’t miss the likes of the Rock, Bradley Cooper and Hugh Jackman lighting up our screens, after all. Even for $12 a pop. But all movie…
