Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity: the spontaneous “USA! USA!” chant that erupts after an out-of-his-mind Zac Efron announces to spring breakers that he’s just unknowingly smoked crack, or Aubrey Plaza commanding as foreplay that Robert De Niro, as the…
“Who can give me the derivative of X?” a high-school teacher asks early in the YA-apocalypse mashup The 5th Wave. As soon as she asks that, the lights blink off, everybody’s cellphones die and jets tumble from the sky. We never hear a student respond, but here’s my Official Fan…
It takes a talented filmmaker to emit the aura of early Roman Polanski films in his work. Evgeny Ruman, whose new work The Man in the Wall is showing at the Miami Jewish Film Festival this month, never intended for that to happen. “I wasn’t thinking about Polanski specifically, although I…
In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously left the White House with a warning to the American public about the rise of the military-industrial complex. When Barack Obama exits the Oval Office next year, he wouldn’t be remiss in cautioning the nation about the conspiracy-industrial complex, which has dug its tentacles into…
Hollywood Reporter broke the news Wednesday night that Jennifer Lawrence has signed on to a new bio-pic — this time, it’s to tell the story of Fidel Castro’s former lover, Marita Lorenz. Tentatively titled Marita, Lawrence will play the 19-year-old Lorenz who fell in love with Castro back in the…
The movie they’re selling isn’t the movie this is. Sony Pictures Classics is peddling Nicholas Hytner’s film of Alan Bennett’s play and memoir The Lady in the Van like it’s the usual twinkly Best Exotic time-with-our-elders holiday entertainment. There’s Maggie Smith, dressed up as what my grandmother used to call…
“Every film is a documentary of its actors,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. Starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, Andrew Haigh’s shattering marital drama 45 Years expands that maxim: As we gaze at and listen to these performers, whose characters reflect on nearly a half-century together — almost as long as…
There was a slight drizzle in the air and a breeze for the opening night of the 19th Annual Miami Jewish Film Festival at the Aventura Arts & Cultural Center last Thursday. The Miami winter weather created a bit of chaos for the festival organizers. Thirteen minutes behind schedule, Rabbi…
Plenty of films explore the notion of discovering oneself, but few are so deeply rooted as those by filmmaker Andrew Haigh. From his best-known feature, Weekend, to his television series, Looking, self-discovery is an essential factor that makes his films work, and his latest, 45 Years, is no exception. On…
For movie-buffs and movie-lovers alike, the name Charlie Kaufman rings a bell. After all, he’s the guy behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation to name a few. But he and Duke Johnson — the co-director of Anomalisa — seem to just be getting started with delivering fascinating…
If a first feature is meant to be one’s calling card, Deniz Gamze Ergüven is a name the world won’t soon be forgetting. Her debut, Mustang, premiered at Cannes and won the Europa Cinemas Label Award and, just this week, was nominated for Best Foreign Lanuage Film for the 88th…
Benghazi is a hashtag battle cry, a call to arms that many Americans don’t understand. Unlike the simplicity of “Remember the Alamo!” a bleat of “Benghazi!” still has people wondering, “Wait, what happened? And why are we mad?” Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi has an explanation,…
Critics rarely receive love from filmmakers. Last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, Birdman, featured a vengeful harpy of a theater reviewer (played by Lindsay Duncan) hellbent on annihilating a play before she’d even seen it. Birdman was joined in its release year by other unfair portraits of critics in Top…
Alan Rickman has died at the age of 69. To Americans of a certain generation, he’ll always be Hans Gruber from Die Hard; to those of a slightly fresher vintage, he’ll never not be Severus Snape. But it was his ability to transcend the typecasting of those iconic roles that…
The Miami Jewish Film Festival is back in town everybody and with it comes a solid selection and variety of movies to explore. But with so many films and so many places to see ‘em, it’s tough to choose exactly which ones to hit up. And that’s why we’ve made…
The Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival is summoning the fantastic to the Magic City this weekend. The festival is only in its third year, but it has doubled in size, adding workshops and lectures to the already packed onslaught of short and feature film screenings. Over 30 independent films…
MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles is gorgeous and lunkheaded, gory and hilarious, sometimes awful and sometimes full of awe. It’s also quite welcome: Just as Terry Brooks tore the pompousness out of Tolkien with his pulpy, brick-thick Shannara novels, the series – executive produced by Jon Favreau – shows your Game…
Seated in the center of a long couch in a meeting room at the Mandarin Oriental, Olivia Munn leans back and lets her body fall into the plush cushion. She looks relaxed and comfortable — two things actors rarely appear after a long day of press. Wearing a formfitting blood-orange…
The conversation about female filmmakers rarely being highlighted in the festival scene isn’t ending anytime soon. Slowly but surely, organizers are trying to widen the lens and include more women. The Miami International Film Festival is joining the conversation and announced today their new partnership with Google on a seminar…
“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…
