Do we call Anthropoid a thriller? Sean Ellis’ earnest, day-ruining WWII bullet-a-thon is rooted in fact but comes on like pulp fiction in its first reels, hitting secret-mission story beats old enough to have served in the big war. As freedom fighters Josef (Jamie Dornan) and Jan (Cillian Murphy) skulk…
On both an emotional and narrative level, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film pulls you in slowly, almost unexpectedly. The acclaimed Japanese director, whose works include After Life (1998), Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013), makes movies about things like loss, abandonment and death, but his distinct touch —…
Horror junkies, rejoice: One of the most anticipated festivals for genre fans in South Florida kicks off this Friday. Popcorn Frights, the weeklong film festival taking place at O Cinema Wynwood, packs 17 features and an abundance of short films into just one week like so many dismembered limbs into…
Catherine Corsini’s lovely, sultry Summertime, a 1971-set tale about two women of different ages and class backgrounds who fall in love, celebrates erotic abandon but never loses its mind. Unlike Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), France’s most notorious treatment of a sapphic sentimental education, Corsini’s movie, which…
With unflagging honesty and compassion, Clay Tweel’s documentary Gleason charts the journey of former New Orleans Saints safety Steve Gleason as he copes with the ruinous nerve disease ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. That description, however, can’t quite do justice to Tweel’s film, which is partly built around video journals…
Brady Corbet has emerged as the face of millennial malaise on the strength of roles in films like Simon Killer, Clouds of Sils Maria and Melancholia, but what he really wants to do is direct — and direct he does in The Childhood of a Leader, his ambitious behind-the-camera debut…
Pete’s Dragon is as cuddly as the mountains of plush toys Disney hopes to sell from it. A disarmingly homespun blockbuster, this loose remake of the studio’s 1977 live-action/animation hybrid is perhaps best defined by all the things it’s not: It’s not a soaring action flick, nor an indulgence in…
Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a likable study of delusions of grandeur. Working from real-life material, Frears creates an alternately funny and mysterious portrait of someone whom most viewers either don’t know at all or regard as an odd footnote in musical history. We first see Florence (Meryl Streep)…
In his latest family portrait, Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda chronicles roughly a year in the life of the Koda clan — or what’s left of it. When, years ago, her father left for another woman and their mother subsequently abandoned the family to live her own life, Sachi (Haruka…
Miami is known as a melting pot of sorts; gathering and assimilating various cultures and people in one magical metropolis. All of the locales like Little Haiti, South Beach, and Miami’s Design District are distinctive in their own individual way, yet a city is only as strong as the sum…
Summer is waning, and because the blockbusters this season have proven rather disappointing, it’s time to get back into the classic film groove and check out some of the many options available this month across the Magic City. Here’s what August has in store for classic film screenings in Miami…
James Schamus has been making movies for as long as Ang Lee has been directing them. The two have penned and produced multiple films together, including Eat Drink Man Woman, The Ice Storm, Lust, Caution, and even Hulk. So moving into the role of director for the first time with…
Director Paula Ortiz’s brilliant spin on Federico García Lorca’s classic play Blood Wedding unfolds within the film’s first few seconds. La Novia (The Bride) opens with an overhead shot of a woman who appears almost mummified in a torn and bloodied dress. After a sudden gasp for air, actress Inma Cuesta peels…
Suicide Squad, the third installment of the DC Extended Universe series, hits theaters this weekend; and we’re super-pumped (crappy reviews be damned!). So pumped, in fact, that we decided play the part of the film’s secret government agency and create our own antihero team made up entirely of South Florida people…
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, published in 1943, might stand as a children’s classic, but it’s not-so-secretly a story for grown-ups. Kids have long been drawn to the book’s dreamy sense of wonder, to the golden-haired star-child of the title, but Saint-Exupéry’s ruminations on regret, solitude and loss belong…
“The world changed when Superman flew across the sky,” Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller says early on in Suicide Squad. “And then it changed again when he didn’t,” she continues, over somber images of the Man of Steel’s funeral following his (non-)death at the end of Batman v. Superman. Luckily, that…
Think back on all of the best or most-talked-about shows of the past few decades: The Sopranos. Seinfeld. Mad Men. Nearly all take place in New York City. But how often do you hear about a show set in Miami? Is it not a city worth writing about? Sure, it…
Writer Keith Gessen once said that Philip Roth wasn’t a misogynist and didn’t hate women because he spent all his time “thinking about fucking them.” But he did concede that Roth probably thought “women were a foreign country.” In James Schamus’ debut feature Indignation, an adaptation of a late Roth…
You can have your houses of cards, your Jessica Joneses, your wet hot American summers. The Netflix original with its finger firmest on the pulse of our fraught current moment? It comes from Germany, comprises three feature-length “episodes,” and commences its tale more than a quarter-century ago. NSU: Germany History…
Just over a minute into the third season of the Netflix animated comedy BoJack Horseman, an entertainment-news interviewer asks our hero, “What would an Oscar nomination mean for BoJack Horseman?” The rest of the season is dedicated to answering that question, tracking BoJack (voiced by Will Arnett) from press junkets…
Alec Baldwin is no Steve Harvey. Unlike Harvey, Baldwin seems diminished on the set of a retro ’70s game show dedicated to getting contestants to say gently dirty nonsense. On ABC’s baggy, boozy Match Game, Baldwin crabs into a skinny last-century microphone about how everything’s stupid: his celebrity panelists, the…
“A supermarket transforms into a universe about pregnancy when a preoccupied woman dashes in and discovers she’s pregnant with no way out.” To anyone who unfortunate enough to land in this situation, it probably sounds like a nightmare. But in her short film Supermarket, filmmaker Rhonda Mitrani intends to turn unplanned…
