Would you sign on for three months in shark-infested waters on a tippy raft under a captain who can’t swim? The shrewdest joke in Kon-Tiki’s surefire story — about Thor Heyerdahl’s 4,000-mile South Pacific expedition to prove that ocean-faring Incans could have settled Tahiti — is that practically every character…
In the House Takes the Thriller Apart to Build It Anew
A trashy vampire flick in art film drag, Kiss of the Damned satisfies on neither level. Drawing on a host of Euro-horror influences including but far from limited to a synth score reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Goblin-performed soundtracks, Xan Cassavetes’s pastiche follows lonely bloodsucker Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) as…
“It’s right out of a cheap melodrama,” one character remarks in From up on Poppy Hill, after a particularly extreme twist of fate — yet this film’s gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one’s suspension of disbelief. A film about fathers and children, and…
Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s: The 1 Percenters in Their Lair
The Angels’ Share Takes on Class Issues Via Whiskey
In the course of reviewing movies in the early 2000s, just as computer-generated special effects were becoming radically sophisticated and were also, increasingly, becoming the chief selling point of big-ticket movies, I more and more often found myself invoking the name “Ray Harryhausen.” He died on Tuesday, May 7, 2013…
In his new film, the social drama At Any Price, director and co-writer Ramin Bahrani examines how the transformation of food into intellectual property through seed patents has corrupted, impoverished, or dissolved the American family farm. As with the Iranian-American director’s previous films (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo),…
Uwe Boll will no longer fight you — at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once literally got into the boxing ring with four film bloggers, but these days prefers to combat negative press with what he claims are more…
A big winner at last year’s SXSW, Gimme the Loot is a pocket-size Bronx indie with the wispiest of narrative ideas: A couple of teen graffiti bombers decide to gain fame by tagging the Mets’ Home Run Apple. Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are mates only in spraying,…
The only thing we English teachers hate more than Sparknotes is a high quality, mostly faithful movie version of a book. Why would a student slog through Pride and Prejudice when she can drool over Colin Firth in the excellent BBC miniseries? And shh! Don’t tell the eighth graders about…
Upscale parties. Couture gowns. Top-shelf booze at exclusive restaurants. These are the kinds of things we associate with the faaaahbulous lifestyles of Bravo’s Real Housewives series. But according to a report in OK Magazine, the Miami housewives’ lives are a little more shabby chic. Of all six Real Housewives franchises,…
Burn Notice fans aren’t messing around. Coconut Grove politicians found that out when they tried to kick the USA series out of its filming hub last year, and met instead with mobs of angry TV viewers holding handmade signs outside City Hall. Turns out, that’s just the tip of the…
Miami is a city with its fair share of badasses. Pain and Gain, hello! But bodybuilders, basketball players and bouncers are one thing — ninjas are a whole other category of awesome. There are few who make the grade. And finding these select few is the purpose of the hit…
Last night, Brickell got a head start on International Star Wars Day (which is actually on Saturday, May the Fourth) by turning Spazio nightclub into a cantina worthy of Han Solo. For Star Wars Cantina Cosplay night, the venue provided branded lightsaber surrogates, an LED screen featuring the iconic logo,…
While you were clicking ‘like’ on that photo of your cousin’s ugly baby, Billy Donnelly was busy getting fired through Facebook. Donnelly was until recently known as The Infamous Billy the Kidd, South Florida editor of Ain’t It Cool News (spoiler alert: it ain’t). He doesn’t want to insult his…
Are Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson BFFs? Possibly. Not even a week after their made-in-Miami film Pain & Gain hit theaters, HBO has announced the two will team up yet again, this time for a half-hour dramedy about retired athletes in — where else? — Miami. See also:…
When Michael Bay and the writers of Pain & Gain adapted Pete Collins New Times feature story for the screen, they stayed mostly faithful to reality. But there was one thing Bay just had to have in his foray into dark comedy. Dildos. Lots and lots of dildos. So he…
Miami Beach Cinematheque director Dana Keith finds it difficult to make time for anything else but cinema. That’s particularly true this week; his art house is in the middle of hosting screenings for the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which included an appearance by James Franco whose film, Interior…
When we last heard from porn star (or, as she put it, “mattress actress”) Lisa Ann, it was the summer of 2012. Ann was headed to Tampa, Florida, to reprise the role that made her famous: a Sarah Palin look-alike in the modern cinema classic Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?. But now,…
Obstacle courses like mud runs have become popular recently among Miami athletes who like to push their bodies to the limit. Now, the mother of them all is setting up right in downtown. And she is swole. American Ninja Warrior, G4 TV’s brawny sports competition, returns to the Magic City…
Iron Man 3 opens this week. For some viewers the film’s appeal isn’t the eponymous superhero, but the sarcastic-yet-sensitive hero behind the gravity-defying, repulsor-ray-shooting suit of armor. I refer, of course, to Shane Black. Iron Man 3’s co-writer–director recharged the buddy-cop flick in the ’80s with his screenplay for Lethal…
