In André Téchiné’s vibrant new film Being 17, two teens wrestle with desire and hostility in a mountainous corner of France. The subject matter is not new for Téchiné, who has for more than 40 years explored sexual self-awakening, alienation and family strife in films notable for their consistency and…
If I have to hear Ti West’s movies called “slow burns” one more time, I might set my laptop on fire right quick. West’s breakthrough hit, The House of the Devil, was a leisurely paced throwback to early ’80s Satanic panic — before the slasher, with plenty of obvious jump…
“How could a big man like you fuck up like this?” That’s the question that Nathan Zuckerman fears being asked — in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1997) — if he were to show the book he’s written about the tragic life of his old Newark classmate Seymour “Swede” Levov…
“These are the images that have marked me and leave me wondering still.” That’s how Kirsten Johnson prefaces Cameraperson, made up of footage she has collected over 25 years of working as a camera operator, cinematographer and director on dozens of different documentaries — films like Laura Poitras’ The Oath…
Adults in 2016 know not to feed the trolls. If you have to, though, you need to come on hard and strong, publicly glutting them on so much truth that they just curl up and die under their bridges/in their comment threads. So it goes in Mick Jackson’s patient, heartening…
Half a century after its debut, The Battle of Algiers has a permanent parking spot in the film canon. After taking home the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (one in 1967 and two in 1969, oddly) and now ranks within…
A young man tramples through the snow in fast, furious, headlong motion in the beginning of André Téchiné’s Being 17, a film that proceeds at a similar clip. So have many of the director’s previous works: Téchiné, who began making movies five decades ago and remains the best-known of France’s…
Have there ever been entertainment-media product tie-ins like the Ouija movies? The shriekingly enjoyable Ouija: Origin of Evil, like its less successful 2014 predecessor Ouija, lays out as its best case that the toy it’s advertising will destroy your life, maybe kill your family and damn your very soul. 30…
Even those of us with a soft spot for dumb, high-concept Hollywood comedies might be outraged by the limp, unfunny nothingburger that is Keeping Up with the Joneses. A wan attempt to mix the comedy of domestic anxiety with the comedy of inept espionage — think Neighbors meets Central Intelligence…
Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…
Season three of Amazon’s Transparent has few of the cratering events that have marked our time with the Pfeffermans up to this point, but it continues to reward thinking viewers as it considers issues of gender and identity, the intersection of theory and reality, the lingering impact of sexual abuse…
“Shit’s getting ugly in the RuPaul Drag Race.” —Janae, Orange Is the New Black RuPaul’s All Stars 2 has been perhaps the greatest season of the only reality-TV competition that matters. Logo TV’s Emmy-winning series is not only a mainstream ingress into a historically devalued, antinormative art form for an…
If it seems like there’s a lot to be excited about within Miami Film Festival’s 13-film lineup for its Gems series, it’s because there is. The October installment of the festival, taking place between October 13 and 16, is meant to just give a taste of what’s to come for…
It was only a few years ago that filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall was living in Miami and working on her short film, Si Nos Dejan, commissioned by Borscht Corp. Now, she’s coming back to the city as part of the Borscht 9.5 mini-festival with her debut feature film, Ma, for a…
There’s plenty of time to wonder, as J.K. Simmons narrates page after page of backstory, whether the creators of The Accountant realized that their dutifully twisty R-rated thriller was actually another superhero story. Yes, it’s got trappings of psychology and adult thoughtfulness, speeches about the mysteries of the brain and…
The month before Fish Tank writer/director Andrea Arnold premiered her film American Honey at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), she spoke before an audience with director Ira Sachs as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The following are excerpts of her remarks, edited for clarity…
This is the one where a guy eats his own puke. The one where Divine stabs a boyfriend to death, gorges on his innards, then makes out with her own bloodied image in the mirror. The one where she’s sodomized with a rosary while we see images of the crucifixion…
The techniques of verbatim theater go back decades, to at least the 1950s, when young German theater troupes would reenact complicated court cases word for word onstage. Even earlier, in the United States, the WPA paid for a form of this performance with its Living Newspapers, in which theater artists…
In American Honey, her 162-minute fourth feature (and the first she’s made in the U.S.), the British director Andrea Arnold sets an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a conversation about dreams to Bruce Springsteen singing “Dream Baby Dream” and a moment of camaraderie among itinerant youngsters traveling across…
Here’s what matters most: You will laugh. Kevin Hart on a stage before thousands, yapping for more than an hour? I don’t care what kind of miserable killjoy you are, you’re going to laugh. There are two reasons you might be offended — you may find the material either too…
Christopher Guest’s films mostly deal with passionate but ordinary people who aspire to positions of status within strange little subcultures: mid-century folk music, dog shows, community theater or, in the case of his new mockumentary, Mascots, the world of sports-mascot competitions. In the alternate universe of Guest’s first film in…
So much for your weekend plans. Miami filmmaking collective Borscht Corp. has announced the dates of its next film festival — and it starts Wednesday. The “mini film fest,” as Borscht’s announcement describes it, runs through Saturday with a series of screenings and afterparties by some of Miami’s best-known filmmakers:…
