The Miami International Film Festival, which ended Sunday, has announced its competition winners. The Best Miami Mini Film was awarded to Where It Stops by local filmmaker Kyle Shea. As you’ll see in the above clip, it’s an intense and uncomfortable short film about aging. Yet with all the gambling…
After producing several documentary films (and a few shorts) over the last six years, Bahamian filmmaker Kareem Mortimer has finally made the leap to feature-length fiction work with Children of God. And he has no intention of looking back. “Documentaries were really, really important to me. I will probably return…
Catherine Keener has played the smart, neurotic gal in so many indie flicks, we assumed she was born in the land of Woody Allen — New York City. But the actress was actually born and raised right here in Miami. She’s a graduate of Hialeah’s Archbishop Coleman F. Carroll High…
Matt Damon and his WMD of a movie Green Zone confirm the big lie, Hollywood-style
The Rizzos are an average family — two parents, two kids — who make their home on City Island, an old fishing town in the Bronx. The patriarch, Vince (Andy Garcia), is a New York State corrections officer with dreams of being an actor. His wife, Joyce (Julianna Margulies), is…
On Saturday night, we saw the American debut of Swedish film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at the Miami International Film Festival. Gusman was packed. Not only was the 1,600-seat house sold out, a hundred or so people waiting outside for tickets had to be turned away. (Psst, we…
On the surface, this debut feature by writer-director Florence Jaugey is about a girl boxer, Yuma (Alma Blanco), struggling to escape the barrios of Managua. She lives in a concrete-floor shack with her often-absent mother, unemployed pedophilic stepdad, teen junkie brother, and two younger siblings. She loves and protects the…
Last night, the closing night film of the Miami International Film Festival The Secret in Their Eyes won the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the Academy Awards. According to the festival’s artistic director Tiziana Finzi, director Juan José Campanella will not only attend this year’s closing night, he’s bringing that…
Michel Gondry must have been on to us. He knew we’d expect something as imaginative as his last film, The Science of Sleep, or his popular Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So in The Thorn in the Heart (L’Épine Dans le Coeur), he presents an evenhanded documentary about his…
In 1994, Juan Angel Ruiz was involved in a devastating car wreck. In the first terrifying moments after regaining consciousness in his hospital bed, Juan Angel tried to look around the room. “I opened my eyes. The light over my bed blinded me. It was too bright,” he says in…
There are certain bands that embody the spirit of Miami, gathering the energy that shimmers on the street like heat haze. With its smart blend of Afro-Cuban rhythms with Latin jazz, hip-hop, electro, loads of funk, Spam Allstars are chief among these. The band has come a long way since…
Born into the itinerant life of a con artist, Kay (Aida Folch) is a sexy but street-tough young woman who has helped her father, Sebas (Manuel Morón), run scams since she learned to walk. For years, they’ve lived off small scores, skipping from one city to the next across Spain…
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is not nearly curiouser and curiouser enough
Miami International Film Festival 2010 goes for the little guy
In this rare Iranian entry to MIFF, Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi takes us through the underground music scene in Tehran, where all Western-style music is prohibited. Based on real people, places, and events, Nobody Knows About the Persian Cats follows Negar Shaghaghi and Ashkan Koshanejad of the indie band Take…
Chamaco is the only Cuban film showing at the Miami International Film Festival this year. Made for a few hundred dollars, it’s part of a new wave of independent movies now produced on the island thanks to cheap digital cameras. It’s also the first to seriously tackle homosexuality and chauvinism…
A few hours after midnight, a man and a woman meet randomly on the cold, wet streets of Bogotá. He’s Jorge (Quique Mendoza), a taxi driver whose brother was mysteriously murdered. She’s Angela (Gloria Montoya), a sexy but emotionally damaged party girl with out-of-control coke and liquor habits. Gradually, as…
Hugh Hefner is old. He’s so old that Hollywood types have started projects based on his legacy. There are the rumors (tweeted by Hefner himself) that Diablo Cody is writing a movie about him. And one of the documentaries at this year’s Miami Film Festival is Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist…
Eric (Steve Evets) was once a spry young man who met the love of his life at a dance competition. He’s now a graying, slouching postman, slowly losing his mind and stuck caring for two teenage sons. He’s so miserable that his fellow postmen stage a little self-help visualization session…
A last-minute addition to the Miami International Film Festival screening schedule, Bruce Weber’s short documentary Liberty City Is Like Paris to Me is among the most locally focused films in this year’s fest. And, for that reason, it could also end up being a lightning rod for debate. Already, we’ve…
Leo can’t deliver the goods to his girlfriend of six months. And there’s a good reason – he’s gay. But this is Catholic Uruguay, and men don’t just go around kissing other men in public. In Leo’s Room (El Cuarto de Leo), the title character, played by puppy-eyed Martín Rodríguez,…
Despite the fact they’ve been a committed couple for three and a half years, Sonia (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Daniel (Romain Duris) don’t even live together. She sleeps alone in a big, polished Paris apartment while Daniel crashes across town in a perpetually in-progress renovation project that she’s nicknamed his “secret…
