The made-in-Miami film Moonlight took home one of the Golden Globes’ biggest awards last night: the statue for Best Motion Picture – Drama, the grand finale of the ceremony. It was a relief to many critics and fans of the film, who’d begun to fear it would be shut out…
In the ’80s and ’90s, there were action movies. They starred muscly guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, or martial artists from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Cynthia Rothrock, or actors who were dedicated to the physical demands of the genre, like Bruce Willis or Wesley Snipes. They mostly told…
Almost all of the history of American movies flows into Steven Spielberg, and the movies that have come since can’t help but be in response. As a storyteller and as a cultural figure, his closest precedent isn’t John Ford or David Lean, but Dickens, another age’s popular titan, beloved more…
New year, new us! JK, new year, same ol’ us: watching TV and hiding in a hole from the bitter January cold and impending doom. The only solution? Watching all the television! You can take the day of the inauguration off to protest, but I expect you back under the…
For 75 years, the U.S. has dominated the production of World War II action comedies. There’s Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), Cary Grant and Tony Curtis in Operation Petticoat (1959), and then exquisite ensembles in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Kelly’s Heroes (1970) and Inglourious Basterds (2009), among many others. We’re such experts…
What does it take for a woman to win the trust it takes to become an action director? For Anna Foerster, it took two decades, an expert’s knowledge of visual effects and cinematography and a directing gig on key episodes of a cult television show — Starz’s Outlander. Now she’s…
For fans of Billy Corben and the content that his Miami-based Rakontur Studios continues to kick out, this latest bit of Twitter news will be music to their ears: A third installment of Cocaine Cowboys, Rakontur’s Miami-centric illegal-drug-trade series, is in the works. The series could even hit a small screen near you within the year.
Like many people after Carrie Fisher’s untimely passing on Tuesday, December 27, I was moved to revisit Postcards From the Edge, the Mike Nichols–directed film that Fisher adapted from her own novel. This was the sole feature screenwriting credit for the actress-novelist, despite the fact that she was for decades…
“With all respect, sir, may I ask, who are you?” “What you see before you is a man, a simple monk.” “Are you the Lord Buddha?” “I believe I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you…
The entire time Gianfranco Rosi is talking, he’s drawing. Using a graphite pencil against an unlined notebook, the Italian documentary filmmaker instinctively makes quick sketches to illustrate his ideas and anecdotes. Counting off the number of windows on a ship, he draws three little squares. Talking about the deathly Mediterranean…
There are two distinct movies in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, and you could say that somewhere in between them lies the real one. The director, an Italian documentarian whose observational films demonstrate a formal rigor that often brings them close to experimental cinema and installation work, has trained his…
Martin Scorsese opens his foreword to the latest edition of Shusaku Endo’s Silence with a simple, impossible question: “How do you tell the story of Christian faith?” The director isn’t presumptuous enough to present his adaptation of that beloved novel as a definitive answer, but his film does read as…
Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…
Both a film noir and a candy-colored confection, Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is one of the most absorbing films he’s made in years. It’s also, perhaps, one of the saddest: Its bright hues and vivid textures offset a deep, unshakable melancholy. Based on a trio of Alice Munro short stories, Julieta…
There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…
Once upon a time, in the dark ages of not-that-long-ago, foreign television was a mysterious land beyond our reach. Aside from the occasional British import, the wonders of international series were limited to those equipped with multi-region DVD players. Scandinavian gloom mostly stayed in Scandinavia. Thanks to streaming, it’s now…
“Best films of 2016” lists are a dime a dozen this time of year. But even though 2016 was a disaster in many ways, it gave us plenty of great films by women. So just as we did in 2015 and 2014, New Times is running down the works that reigned above the rest. These are the 16 best films by women of the past year.
Carrie Fisher was always smarter than the words and roles written for her, smarter than what Hollywood thought it wanted out of a princess. On Christmas Eve of the all-devouring Sarlacc that is 2016, after word had spread that Fisher had suffered a heart attack, a page from her original The Empire Strikes Back script turned up on Twitter, courtesy of Will McCrabb.
As 2016 draws to a close, New Times is looking back at the year’s stories that had the most impact. Ten film and TV articles stood out from the rest, according to their high number of readers. This year, Miami readers proved to be an eclectic bunch, clicking on a weird mélange of pieces that one might not expect. So what’s on the list?
Nice girls play by the rules. They turn their shoulders inward and nibble on the ends of their slim fingers, nervous about all those difficult thoughts in their heads. And their hair is always perfect and feathery like a baby bird on a collector’s plate. If this description sounds angry,…
Few Spanish filmmakers are as well-known and widely loved as Pedro Almodóvar, the man behind Volver, Todo sobre mi madre, and Hable con ella. With his latest film, Julieta, hitting Miami theaters on January 6th, O Cinema is launching a retrospective of his work, including seven of his features. “For…
After announcing its nominees last Wednesday, the Florida Film Critics Circle revealed its winners yesterday. Though the Miami-made film Moonlight earned 10 nominations from the critics this year, it ended up with just one win in its nominated categories: The Pauline Kael Breakout Award for director Barry Jenkins. Moonlight and its cast…
