“It is no longer enough for us to just give access to Jewish-interest films. What is at stake for us now is to present the best of world cinema that has a cultural insight and value,” Igor Shteyrenberg, director of the Miami Jewish Film Festival, says boldly. Leading the festival…
A dry-rubbed lark from the often harrowing ultra-realist territories of the Romanian New Wave, The Treasure is about almost nothing — a shaggy-dog daydream as flyaway as its protagonists’ thoughts of instant wealth. Director Corneliu Porumboiu, whose 2006 12:08 East of Bucharest may still…
If you buy into reductive ideas about generations, The Benefactor — Andrew Renzi’s creepy, stately drama of guilt and charity — gains much suggestive resonance. Here’s Richard Gere, that silvery ur-boomer, the American Gigolo now adrift as the depressive who owns the world but prefers not to be out in…
“Tab was a good movie star,” says John Waters near the beginning of the sprightly new documentary Tab Hunter Confidential. When I ask Hunter himself, on the phone from California, if he thinks he was a good movie star, he’s reluctant to share his friend’s enthusiasm. “I don’t know,” he…
Charlie Kaufman is a cartographer of the soul. You can picture him hunched over parchment accurately inking each dark river and, off to the side, cautioning that there be dragons. What makes Kaufman cinema’s best psychoanalyst is a contradiction. He sees people for who we are — hurtful, hopeful, lovely,…
A sure-bet time-waster with a clutch of big laughs? A 100-minute brief on Hollywood’s lack of imagination? Grist for future essays about how quickly the idea of Ice “Fuck tha Police” Cube playing a gun-happy hero cop became routine? Whatever you make of Ride Along 2 beforehand is certain to…
Back in December, we sat with local filmmaker and writer Joshua Jean Baptiste to talk about his project, #Josh, making it to the final round for Project Greenlight’s Digital Series contest. The HBO-backed company put out a call to young filmmakers all across the States offering a $25,000 grant (plus…
If you’ve seen a solid amount of independent films in the last two decades, chances are you’ve seen at least one of the films produced by Killer Films. The company, which has brought us everything from Larry Clark’s Kids to Todd Haynes’ latest Carol, was co-founded by producer Christine Vachon,…
It’s hard to imagine a more unsettling setting for a horror movie than Aokigahara, the famed “suicide forest” of Japan to which scores of pilgrims travel every year to end their lives. At the edge of the woods — which, per Japanese mythology, are rife with demons — is a…
Welcome to 2016, everybody! And with the beginning of any New Year comes two things: a bunch of awards movies flooding theaters, and just as many awful early-year releases polluting the multiplexes. Instead, why not go the safe (and likely, a whole lot more entertaining) route? You know it: classic…
The seventh episode of Transparent’s second season, now available on Amazon, takes place on Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year in the Hebrew calendar, it’s a holiday on which Jews fast to symbolically atone for their sins. It’s also a significant occasion for Transparent, which, like the Pfefferman…
Ever woken up, looked in the mirror and thought, Dammit, I’m so handsome, this face should be on TV, or felt that you were destined for more than just your 9 to 5? Well, my friends, the time has come for your (potential) 15 minutes of silent, background fame. We’re talking…
Natalie Dormer sits near the window in a hotel room at the Mandarin Oriental, with Miami’s skyline and clear-blue bay her natural backdrop. She wears a red-and-white floral-print blazer that aesthetically complements the topic at hand: her latest film, The Forest. The 33-year-old actress is in town to promote the…
A passive protagonist. Very little conflict. The need for heavy narration to carry meaning. On the checklist of reasons not to adapt a literary source to the screen, Doris Lessing’s short story “Victoria and the Staveneys” ticks nearly every box short of “Is about people who get off on car…
They could have called it Hitchcock/Truffaut/Scorsese/Fincher. Less an adaptation of one of the great books about film than a feature-length recommendation, Kent Jones’ documentary take on François Truffaut’s exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock — Hitchcock/Truffaut — is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips…
If you’ve kept abreast of international cinema this year you’ll have no doubt heard much about Arabian Nights: The three-part, 381-minute Portuguese epic by Miguel Gomes has been the toast of the festival circuit since its premiere at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes this May. And yet despite the ecstatic reception,…
A Miami man with his very own Heroes-like talent is set to appear on Fox’s Superhuman special. Cuban-born Miami resident Yusnier Viera will appear on the new two-hour special hosted by actor Kal Penn, and featuring guest-judges Mike Tyson, actress/comedian Mary Lynn Rajskub, and neurosurgeon Dr. Rahul Jandial. Twelve ordinary contestants will display…
Despite it being December in Miami, it’s hot outside. As the wind blowing around Joshua Jean-Baptiste is hot and sticky, the actor/writer/director/producer sits comfortably in a brown suede blazer, black felt hat, and pairs the ensemble with a pop of color with round pink sunglasses. The 26-year-old takes a break…
As cinematic year 2015 reaches its end, the FOMO specter threatens to haunt us all. If you pored over the results of our film poll and felt aghast at how many apparently great movies you’ve yet to see, here at last is a chance to catch up without braving traffic…
One of our most enduring cinematic genres, horror is also among the most difficult to do right. This may sound obvious — countless attempts are made to scare moviegoers every year, whether in theaters or, increasingly, streaming online — but it’s brought into focus by the few that actually make…
With the year coming to an end and the bulk of “Best of” lists featuring a mountain of the same kind of film we witness every year, it’s time to offer up something a little different. So instead of bombarding you with another list of movies about straight guys and…
The Danish Girl, Tom Hooper’s portrait of Jazz Age painters Gerda Wegener and her spouse Einar, who butterflied into Lili Elbe via the first sex-reassignment surgery, is about gender and it isn’t. Like its subject, it’s fatally resolved to fit an ideal: the noble Oscar-bait biopic. If the script swapped…
