Here’s some good news: Netflix is now streaming Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. No other TV show is quite so ambitious or politically deft as star and executive producer Rachel Bloom’s (and co-creator Aline Brosh McKenna’s) darkly comic, whip-smart send-up of romantic comedies. The title alone has turned more than one of my…
Sometimes a movie seems like it was more fun to make than it is to watch. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates is one of those movies. Zac Efron and Adam DeVine are Dave and Mike Stangle, two troublemaking brothers with a knack for walking the tightrope of party-makers/breakers. With…
If there’s a war movie we haven’t seen enough of yet, it’s one from the female perspective, one that further obscures who the good guys and bad guys really are. In Anne Fontaine’s moody feature The Innocents, even the nuns are gray. During a bitterly cold winter, tucked away in…
In one of many throwaway gags in The Secret Life of Pets, a group of dogs gathering for an all-important rescue operation is momentarily sidetracked by a butterfly, which sends them into a riot of leaping and yelping. Pets are easily distracted, you see. And you know who else is…
“They call guys like us War Dogs — bottom-feeders who make money off of war, without ever stepping foot on the battlefield. It was meant to be derogatory, but we kind of liked it. ” If you think the plot for Jonah Hill and Miles Teller’s new movie War Dogs…
Another scorching month in Miami means it’s time for another trip to the movies. If modern movies aren’t you thing, slide on into a classic film at one of your local art theaters. Think your options are limited on that front? Think again! Check out what Miami has available for…
The 80’s brought us a horde of gruesome and over the top B-movies that eventually became cult classics: Killer Klowns From Outer Space, Re-Animator, and perhaps the greatest of them all, Evil Dead. Three decades later, that gleeful spirit of crafting outlandish, low-budget, horror-comedy movies full of dumb fun is…
James DeMonaco’s Purge series, about a near future in which all crime is legal for one annual 12-hour period, began as a disturbing setup for basic genre thrills: 2013’s franchise-starter was essentially a home-invasion thriller with a dystopian twist. By the time Purge: Anarchy rolled around a year later, the…
If you have ever dabbled in the business of motion pictures, or have ever taken a college course on film, then you know women are underrepresented in the movie industry. That’s why the Borscht Corporation, a nonprofit organization created by filmmakers, is doing more than simply encouraging female filmmakers to…
AMC’s Preacher is a surprisingly sedate creation. It moves at such a glacial pace that you have to wonder if the brain trust behind this adaptation of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s gonzo ‘90s Vertigo comic — Seth Rogen, Sam Catlin and Evan Goldberg — forgot it only has 10…
At last, a Hollywood reimagining with a point. David Yates’ two-fisted pulp-studies spree The Legend of Tarzan doesn’t just update Edgar Rice Burroughs’ white-boy jungle-bro for our age of heightened sensitivities and bit rates. It interrogates the very idea of Tarzan, signing the old sport up for the good fight…
An unlikely buddy comedy-drama about the friendship between a suicidal castaway played by Paul Dano and a flatulent corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe, Swiss Army Man doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you’d watch with your mother. So what was it like to be the mothers of the film’s…
Very few advance screenings preceded Independence Day: Resurgence’s arrival in theaters on the evening of June 23. That’s eight days ahead of the July 4th weekend that in simpler times — like 1996, when Independence Day was the year’s biggest hit — was traditionally reserved for the biggest, ka-blammiest movie of the…
People made a stink about the walkouts during the Sundance premiere of music-video-and-advertising geniuses the Daniels’ first feature film, Swiss Army Man. It stars Daniel Radcliffe (Manny) as a farting, rotting corpse with superpowers and Paul Dano (Hank) as a sad-sack suicidal stalker trying to get home through a forest…
A wiener dog is the perfect mascot for Todd Solondz’s films. Dachshunds are ridiculous, funny without trying, but that zero-dignity waddle belies a much fiercer purpose: to hunt and kill small prey. Solondz’s body of work, stretching from coming-of-age cringefest Welcome to the Dollhouse to his newest, Wiener-Dog, has the…
Can Steven Spielberg do comedy? That seems like a dumb question, since nobody has done more to bring wit to the modern blockbuster; Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws boast as many laugh-out-loud moments as they do thrills. But those gags are often incidental, of the tension-breaking kind. When…
Stanley Kubrick once sent his friend John le Carré a letter about why he couldn’t adapt one of the author’s books. “Essentially,” he wrote, “how do you tell a story it took the author 165,000 (my guess) good and necessary words to tell, with 12,000 words (about the number of…
According to IMDb, Jaume Collet-Serra’s over-before-you-know-it The Shallows runs for one hour and 27 minutes — a number that produces a reaction something like when an NBA roster lists a short-looking player at five-foot-nine and you marvel, Really? Nate Robinson is that tall? The shark thriller has only three or…
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…
