Film, TV & Streaming

The American Black Film Festival Returns With Murder, Tiny Comedians, and Basketball Smooches

You’re either with Brit Marling or you’re against her. The 29-year-old blond filmmaker (who describes herself on Twitter as a tree climber/actor/writer/producer) catapulted out of obscurity in 2011 with two obfuscatory indies — Sound of My Voice and the mournful sci-fi drama Another Earth. Marling specializes in films about faith,…

Delicacy of touch isn’t a particularly valued commodity among American filmmakers. We like pioneer swagger in our directors; particularly in the age of the blockbuster, open-ended questions and eyelash-fringe feelings are suspect. That’s why it’s always been hard to know how to categorize Sofia Coppola, one of our most gifted…

It’s to the great detriment of The Kings of Summer that it follows the identically premised Mud by just weeks. Both films tell bittersweet coming-of-age stories about teenage friends who learn how to become men in a soon-to-be-corrupted Eden, and both are questionably embellished by a predictable teen romance, an…

Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void opens on green leaves, smiling faces, lush billows of fabric that when pieced together, the sensuous images accumulating into a fuller picture, become a wedding dress, tulle and silk diffusing the glow. Engagements, weddings, births, and deaths: This film is a more traditional kind of…

Terrorizing children in their bedrooms remains the existential concern of the toothy blobs, hams, and pop-pom-furred Wild Things that populate Monsters movies, many of whom look like gummy nothings long stuck to the bottom of Pixar’s junk drawer. Their very lives depend upon coaxing night-screams from human kids, a premise…

In World War Z, All That Matters Is Brad Pitt

I recognize that, even coming from a father of two preteen daughters, that might sound alarmist, so let me elaborate—the Disney Channel and its prime competitor, Nickelodeon’s Teen Nick, are a pox upon our tween nation, corrosive forces that impart more awful messages than any of Disney’s retrograde princess films…

In One Track Heart, after reciting a spiritualist maxim about servitude or self-abnegation or the like, Krishna Das has the unfortunate habit of letting his gaze linger on the camera, eyebrows raised, head just perceptibly nodding as if to say “How indisputably cool was that?” Jeffrey Kagel, the subject of…

When Breakup at a Wedding has its Miami premiere at O Cinema tomorrow night, there may be almost as many Miami natives on screen as in the theater. That’s because the director and the star of the comedy are brothers Victor and Philip Quinaz, who are returning home with their…

When the 17th annual American Black Film Festival kicks off in Miami Beach this weekend, one of the highlights is sure to be Fruitvale Station, based on a true story of a young man killed by a cop in an Oakland train station. The film won top prizes at Sundance…

The latest Hollywood promotion to roll through South Florida is also one of its creepiest. And considering that it involves noted weirdo Johnny Depp, that’s not surprising. Depp’s next movie is Disney’s The Lone Ranger, due in theaters July 3. And in a bizarre scavenger hunt/wax museum twist, statues of…

It’s hard to find a more reviled profession than the meter maid. Dentists, tax men, and telemarketers can’t hold a candle to the folks who make their living assaulting innocent dashboards with those evil little slips. But is the hatred unwarranted? Turns out, meter maids are (gasp!) people too. And…

If you grew up in Miami, you know it can get kind of tiresome to listen to El Exilio bitch and moan about Fidel Castro. However, the experience only serves to make Cubamerican, José Enrique Pardo’s documentary about the first generation of post-Castro Cuban-Americans, all the more refreshing. As a…

Miami’s movie geeks have plenty of reasons to be proud. This town has a thriving art house theater scene, some of the best film festivals in the country, and increasing numbers of films by locals earning national and worldwide respect. Some pictures even screen here before they debut in New…

Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is a movie event with an actual movie inside, crying to get out. Despite its preposterous self-seriousness, its overblown, CGI’ed-to-death climax, and its desperate efforts to depict the destruction of, well, everything on Earth, there’s greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman; moments…

Superman is an idea. OK, fine. Technically he’s an intellectual property—a set of data points slammed together by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in the 1930s, sold for $130 to National Allied Publications (later DC Comics/TimeWarner), and subsequently transformed into a nugget of multivariously exploitable content that has netted entertainment…

From the peak of Anchorman to the nadir of Burt Wonderstone, the formula for studio comedies of the past 20 years has been simple: Dude acts like a dick for an hour, turns blandly sweet toward the end, and then everyone on the DVD commentary can claim to have made…

In Evocateur, Morton Downey Jr. Roars Again

Stories We Tell: The Secrets of Sarah Polley’s Mother

The Iran Job: More Than an Underdog Sports Story

Aqui y Alla Is Simple and Elegant