When Doug Blush was growing up in Detroit in the late ‘70s, there wasn’t a lot of movie-making going on there. “I was fascinated with films,” he says, naming Star Wars as a particularly inspiring flick. But, he laments, “they seemed so far away and impossible to be a part of.”…
Summer means longer days, shorter nights, and another excuse to get yourself off the couch and into South Florida’s miles of open waters. Because one of the 305’s favorite pastimes is hanging oceanside, an afternoon on the sand is often accompanied by cold beer, floaties, and thumping tunes. WPBT2’s Changing…
Has Paul Rudd become Hollywood’s idea of the face of economic insecurity? There his handsome mug was, in Ant-Man, beneath a Baskin-Robbins ball cap, his character making do behind an ice-cream counter while Marvel made bank in promotional tie-ins. And now, in The Fundamentals of Caring, Rob Burnett’s alternately winning/cloying…
Woodrow Wilson described D.W. Griffith’s notorious Civil War epic Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.” Gary Ross’ Free State of Jones, which covers roughly the same period as Griffith’s film, is more like writing history with index cards. Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it…
Watching first-time feature director Ben Chace’s Sin Alas is like a stroll through the streets of Havana. You weave through crowds in a pedicab, hang out on street corners to hear the latest gossip and meander on the majestic Malecón, the historic esplanade on the city’s coastline. But it’s not…
In cinema, all things move towards acceptance. In time, debates about filmmakers usually settle in favor of the filmmaker — not because detractors change their minds, but because the urgency of the conflict wanes, and stalemates go to the fans. It’s hard to believe that battle lines were once drawn…
In Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, emotion becomes motion and psychology becomes space. It’s a coming-of-age story, but Holmer mostly eschews dialogue and standard storytelling devices; she tells her tale through movements and patterns and the way that she films them. The Fits follows Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old tomboy…
Director Jake Paltrow (Young Ones, The Good Night) met Brian De Palma at a party. He’d had a few drinks and worked up the courage to talk to the legendary filmmaker, who turned out to be surprisingly open and kind. The next day, Paltrow got an email from the friend…
Let me tell you all the good things about Nicolas Winding Refn’s high-art, lowbrow horror film The Neon Demon before I tell you what I will not tolerate. After Drive, Refn seems obsessed with his idea of Los Angeles, one where there’s always a full moon, no traffic and everyone…
If you have ever watched a documentary film about Latinos in Miami, there’s a good chance it focused on a specific group of immigrants — like Cubans of the ’50s. But have you ever seen a film that represents our diverse city’s entire Latino community? Miami Our City: The Documentary, a…
The most surprising thing about the new buddy action-comedy Central Intelligence is the sight of Kevin Hart playing straight man to another actor’s antics. In previous comedies, Hart has been the pint-sized, fast-talking dynamo at the center of the action. Even in movies where he’s the guy in over his…
Forget Halloween as the time to indulge in all sorts of horrific goodies. The Popcorn Frights Film Festival is back, and it’s got bigger films, bigger ambitions, and a bigger lineup. The fest will take place in August instead of October this year. This edition of Popcorn Frights will offer…
Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a 1900 novel about the depravities in all social strata written from the point of view of a servant named Célestine, has famously been adapted twice before, by two of cinema’s immortals. Benoît Jacquot’s uneven take on the material won’t challenge the stature…
If you can get past the spectacle of British and Australian actors portraying some of the most important figures of 20th-century American literature, Genius is a good example of a prestige pic that is not only literate but surprisingly vibrant. It’s the story of the tumultuous relationship between hot-tempered, Asheville-born…
Finding Nemo may have been a cartoon about a clownfish traveling across the ocean looking for his son, but it was also one of Pixar’s first overt forays into the workings of the human mind. The film, from 2003, was haunted by loss: The protagonist, Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks),…
With not one, but two festival showcases on the horizon, Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival is announcing their call for entries this month. Submissions are officially open for filmmakers to send in their work for Official Selection in its 34th annual season. Works will be considered for both the…
Orenthal James Simpson always seemed a singular figure. Hardly anybody got where he got or did what he did. Certainly nobody got away with it. But of course it isn’t just the man who fascinates: It’s the image. This he shares in common with every super-grandee and megastar, every tabloid…
With the perfect timing of a deadpan comic and the keen observational skills of a zoologist, Athina Rachel Tsangari highlights just how bizarre the most banal of human activities can be. In Attenberg (2010), the filmmaker’s previous feature, walking itself is presented as a deranged means by which to move…
Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…
In 2001 a friend, a grown-up, saw The Fellowship of the Ring more than a dozen time in the theater. Sometimes she’d leave with a half hour left. “I just needed to get to Galadriel and Lothlorien,” she told me. She didn’t need all the climactic fighting. In 2012 I…
Actors Stephen Amell and Megan Fox are no strangers to the spotlight. One plays a superhero behind a mask on the CW’s Arrow, and another got her start being the go-to hot girl for director Michael Bay. The crime-fighter and the hot chic pair up for this summer’s Teenage Mutant…
There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…
