Miami’s most famous abuela is lending her voice to a new Cartoon Network animated series. You already know Jenny Lorenzo as her Abuela character on YouTube and the media site Mitú. Now, the Cuban-American and Miami native has nabbed a recurring role in the upcoming show Victor & Valentino. Premiering on…
Florida fuckery is Rakontur’s bread and butter. As pointed out early on in Screwball, the latest documentary by Miami-based filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman, WTFlorida lore dates back to the 16th Century, when Ponce de León came here seeking the Fountain of Youth. The filmmakers make an important connection…
Us. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching Jordan Peele’s Us unfold. It’s a film that wears its influences on its sleeve — everything from Alfred Hitchcock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a bit of an oddball leaning a la Richard Kelly, albeit in a more palatable, less thematically ambitious fashion…
Latinos in Hollywood know that to truly make a difference in the industry, the change must take place behind the camera as well as in front of it. Producer Maylen Calienes, a Miamian who was born in Cuba and raised in Florida, began her career as an actor but quickly realized she could do more in a different role.
O Cinema Wynwood is now officially closed. All traces of the arthouse, along with its culinary experiment next door, the Wynwood Yard, will likely be bulldozed by the end of the year to make way for a mixed-use building of apartments and shops. But life persisted for…
Five Feet Apart. Noses blowing and heavy sobs will be heard around the world when Five Feet Apart releases this week, another entry into the odd little subgenre that is Romance Featuring One Or More Terminally Ill Characters (whose most popular film is undoubtedly The Fault in Our Stars). At…
Everybody Knows. Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi is a filmmaker who has crafted subtle but focused movies about the dynamics of human relations in Iran. Here, he goes out on a limb with a cast of Spanish actors as varied as that of Cannonball Run — and falls off…
The Miami Film Festival’s opening night documentary, “This Changes Everything,” is a bold call for gender equality in the film industry. It cites devastating statistics that measure women’s participation in some roles as low as 2 percent, and includes testimony from directors, producers, television network executives, and women actors from…
Greta. Neil Jordan’s “Greta” is the best kind of B-movie: a knowingly funny thriller that allows the actress at its core to go ham. Isabelle Huppert, arguably the greatest living actress, plays the titular Greta Hideg, a woman who leaves bags on the trains in New York hoping for someone…
This Changes Everything. This year, Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival takes a big risk with its opening night film. Generally a place for celebratory, uplifting cinema, the first movie to screen at the festival’s centerpiece venue, the storied Olympia Theater, is a documentary that wags its finger at the…
As millions of young people across the country became transfixed by Elvis Presley’s hip shaking, a subculture of young, Jewish, New York-to-Miami Beach transplants looked past the blues and country-tinged sounds coming out of the American South, leaning instead toward the tropical beat of pre-revolution Cuba. This is the story pf the Mamboniks.
Unlike this year’s live-action Oscar shorts, which mostly centered on white boyhood, the Miami Film Festival’s shorts lineup has upped its own ante by bringing a host of diverse voices to the screen for its 36th annual event. The fest lineup balances established talents like Patricia Clarkson with rising local filmmakers.
Miami-based documentary filmmaker Billy Corben speaks in the same style his movies unfold: fast and peppered with plenty of self-effacing jokes. You don’t want to laugh for fear of missing what he might say next. On a tight schedule to finish one of the two films he’s slated to premiere…
Last night’s Green Book’s Best Picture win spoiled the 2019 Academy Awards for many viewers. But before that film, which has been widely criticized for its “white savior” story line, took home the night’s biggest prize, the Oscars seemed to be making improvements in acknowledging both diverse nominees and fan favorites.
On Wednesday afternoon, “One Day at a Time” showrunner Gloria Calderon Kellett tweeted that she had just left a meeting with Netflix and had learned some troubling news about her original series: it was once again in danger of being canceled. Why? Low viewership. Kellett’s full tweet read: “NEWS: Met…
Arctic. The feature film debut by writer-director Joe Penna is a rather grim and grueling survivalist action movie peppered by a handful of startling OMG moments. Underneath all that, however, lies powerful subtext about how purpose adds meaning to life. Arctic follows Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen), the only survivor of a…
Get red carpet ready and head to one of these five South Florida spots on Sunday, February 24, to watch the Oscars with fellow cinephiles.
Globally, kid’s entertainment is a booming, ever-expanding industry with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue each year. In the U.S., children account for 23 percent of the population (74 million people). It’s little wonder why a who’s who of kids’ media giants and attendees from over fifty countries make it a priority to descend upon Miami each February, hunting for the next big hit.
Overtown has long been a mecca for culture. The deeply rooted community in the historic heart of Miami was a center of entertainment in the 1940s and ‘50s, comparable to Miami Beach. Some of most iconic black artists of the time performed in the neighborhood. But Overtown’s cultural significance is…
Before winning awards and audience’s eyeballs, a movie needs connections to movie theaters via a distributor. It’s really the ultimate goal for an independent filmmaker. The Sundance Film Festival is often thought of as the gateway to such success. But Miami-based collaborative documentary filmmakers Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch found…
Alita: Battle Angel. This is a film made up of three distinct, and sometimes conflicting, aesthetics. At its heart is Yukito Kishiro’s manga series Gunnm (or Battle Angel Alita), of which a number of chapters were chopped and rearranged by writers Laeta Kalogridis and James Cameron to create the two-hour…
Directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, and starring André Holland, Netflix’s latest release is a riveting sports drama titled “High Flying Bird.” But it’s more than just the tale of a sports agent trying to disrupt the business during an NBA lockout; it’s a tale that prioritizes characters…
