Hopping off the set of season two of DirecTV’s original series, Kingdom, Natalie Martinez takes a break from filming in Los Angeles. The Miami native refers to the boxing series as a passion project and her voice gets noticeably giddier when she speaks about her work as Alicia Mendez. “It’s…
If you’re like me, a second generation Cuban-American, then you had (or have) a grandmother who grew up on the Caribbean island and one day was forced to leave everything behind in search for a more politically stable home. Life experiences like that tend to harden a person, and while…
After two successful years presenting retrospectives of Jewish filmmakers together, The Miami Jewish Film Festival and Miami Beach Cinematheque announce their 3rd annual Masters of Jewish Cinema series, featuring a retrospective celebrating Billy Wilder’s most iconic films. The series, charmingly titled Some Like It Wilder!, runs from October 14 through…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Aaron Sorkin opens a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Like the small bit of concrete foundation embedded in the brick sidewalk that pokes out in an awkward triangle from under the post office wall on the corner of Grand Avenue and McDonald Street, my memories of the Grove Cinema are slight. The physical evidence of the art house is…
Well, folks, a month of horror and cooler air approaches and, boy, is it a fun one for the classics. With the Halloween spirit all around the place, an abundance of horror hits Miami, but it’s not solely limited to that. Without further ado, here are the classic films showing…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, exactly, onscreen — the…
Jafar Panahi looks happier than he has in a while — and he’s getting out. That’s encouraging, and it doesn’t mean that his latest act of defiance, the film Taxi, isn’t bold. Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran’s 20-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were, like, just ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
“I specialize in Aaron Sorkin jokes. They never fail at parties,” says filmmaker Leslye Headland over the phone while discussing her pop culture jokes in Sleeping With Other People. After hearing the joke, audiences either laugh-out-loud or wonder, “‘Wait, Aaron Sorkin’s a crack addict?’ Everyone’s on his Wikipedia [after that and]…
The Coral Gables Art Cinema will host the U.S. premiere for the Venezuelan film The Longest Distance (La Distancia Mas Larga) this Friday with a red carpet event featuring the film’s director. The debut feature by 37-year-old writer and director Claudia Pinto presents a profoundly heavy subject with a restrained,…
“Cuba’s been sitting here for what, 55 years. Half an hour away, basically giving the biggest superpower in the world the stiff middle finger.” In the season six premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s award-winning travel show, Parts Unknown, the food-loving host travels 90 miles south of Miami to savor some of…
1. “He meant well,” a ticket-buyer said, shuffling miserably out of a Thursday-night screening of Roland Emmerich’s calamitous Stonewall. “That’s got to count for something.” I don’t think that’s true. If those good intentions had counted, they might have inspired Emmerich not to trust himself to helm this fictionalized recounting…
To witness Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is to witness another era entirely, a realm that, for better or worse, no longer exists. Long, dreamlike shots that trail through locations both gorgeous and destitute, offering up four short stories that were meant to depict Cuban life during the early years…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
