Film, TV & Streaming

The Tree of Life: Better than a masterpiece

Miami, the city of sex and scandal, sure is a lame lay in the reality TV sack. We starfished it, (sex on your back, limbs sprawled, motionless) through sleeper series like Miami Social, Khloe and Kourtney Take Miami, the most boring season of Jersey Shore ever, Miami StInk, and 8th…

Good luck finding Miami-based belly dancer Tamalyn Dallal standing still. The performer, teacher, and choreographer also writes books, produces CDs, and now directs films. Catch her latest creation, Zanzibar Dance, Trance, and Devotion, at the Miami Beach Cinematheque on Thursday, with a Q&A session with Dallal following the documentary screening.Zanzibar…

We know. We know. The last thing you want to read about after the Heat’s loss on Sunday is basketball, but thankfully, Basketball Wives has very little to do with dunks and hoops. On last night’s third episode, we learned if there is one event we hope to attend in…

As boarding-school bodice-rippers go, this assured debut by British director and girls’-school alumna Jordan Scott fairly bursts with pent-up carnality trying to ripen under rigid autocracy laden with lesbian denial. Shot in a lushly wild corner of Ireland, Cracks looks as lovely as a colorized old postcard, all vibrant vermilions…

The gnarliest of the master’s recent works, Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme starts with the first half shot almost entirely on video, and provides a dense, visually ravishing metaphor for Western Civilization: Europe is allegorized as a Mediterranean luxury cruise ship in which the casino doubles as a chapel and philosopher…

Film Socialisme: Jean-Luc Godard’s take on Europe then and now

Super 8: J.J. Abrams’s superfun, superloud catastrophe flick

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff at O Cinema June 11 and 12

​Given the recent burst of arts-driven culture in Miami, many of us are learning what it’s like to live as artists. (Translation: we are creative and poor.) In the independent film Gabi on the Roof in July, which opens tomorrow at O Cinema, idealistic 20-year-old Gabi vies for her older…

John Rodriguez and his friends, brothers Gilberto and Fernando Gomez, are the Miami-based, indie production company, Full Moon Productions. They’re currently raising funds to get their absurdist comedy film, Unemployed Wolfman, produced via the community funding site Indie GoGo. Rodriguez and Gilberto have worked as production assistants on Man v…

Thought last week of Basketball Wives was good? Episode two didn’t disappoint either. When we spoke to Jennifer Williams a few months back, we got the feeling she and Evelyn Lozada were growing apart. Last night’s episode proved that might indeed be true. Jennifer can’t really take her friend seriously…

Composer Gabriel Pulido, who conceived the multimedia performance work Deep Surface, has a degree in music synthesis. Perhaps that’s one reason why the Venezuelan-born artist’s collaborations take him to Paris and New York from his home base in Miami, bringing together influences from a variety of sources to create a…

“He gave me half my performance with the lighting,” says actress Kathleen Byron of cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who shot her in 1947’s Black Narcissus. A rebuke to style-versus-substance segregationists, these words pay tribute to the star of Craig McCall’s documentary, a soapbox for the wizened eminence to explain the innovative…

The Real World Miami was one of the Magic City’s all time most popular reality shows. And right up there with it was Miami Ink, which exposed much of the mainstream to what goes on in a tattoo shop. So the prospect of combining both those shows into one has…

Just a few days ago, Meeka Claxton entered our lives as the new cast member on Basketball Wives. And there is one pure and simple reason why we like her so god damn much: She is actually a basketball wife. No, she isn’t a former wife, an ex-fiancé, or a…

The information presented in Werner Boote’s Plastic Planet, which opens at O Cinema this weekend, is so important that the documentary is a must-see for anyone even remotely interested in the staggering health costs of plastic to humans and the planet itself, or in the backroom machinations that have squelched…

YellowBrickRoad: indie horror a la The Blair Witch Project

Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen’s way-back machine

Children of God at O Cinema June 2 through 5

Okay, so the word beg is a little strong. But yes, one of Adult Swim’s producers contacted Miami artist collective Coral Morphologic (Colin Foord and Jared McKay) and asked to use their Oyster Vision video in the new series, Off the Air. Watch above. Their video of the local thorny…

In YellowBrickRoad eight people venture into the remote woods of northern New Hampshire. Care to guess how many get out alive? This indie horror flick by Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland stands squarely on the shoulders of The Blair Witch Project. One of the party’s leaders even does video interviews…