Truth in film takes another jolly beating in Disneynature’s Monkey Kingdom, a documentary-like nature flick with the last-century chutzpah to pass off its marvelous footage of some months in the life of a single-mom macaque as a full-fledged princess story, with three acts, a tearful exile, and her ascent, in the final reels, to the throne. (Oops, spoiler for the anthropomorphized-monkey movie.)
For any thinking person, little in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s fleet and sweaty Colombian-smuggler thriller Manos Sucias will surprise. Drug-running is work for the broke and desperate; the runners might be less broke after a delivery, but that desperation only grows worse; killing is grim and painful and utterly unlike the…
Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in fashion photography, appears to gaze off into the middle distance.
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep.
In 1848, Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she had made a…
Reviews and discussion of Ex Machina, Dior and I, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Longest Ride, and About Elly are all on this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, which includes Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly. [Subscribe to the Voice…
Miami, even more so than many other global locales, is about to feel the effects of environmental negligence. With climate change and sea level rise, the Magic City will be lucky to stick it out ’til 2020—especially given the mind-boggling denial of our state’s leadership. Thankfully, the Miami and the…
It may be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when Daenerys was the most exciting character on Game of Thrones. Played by Emilia Clarke, the exiled royal best embodied the HBO drama’s paradoxical appeal: its mix of historical authenticity and rousing fantasy. Reduced to currency by…
Noah Baumbach has always had a dash of hypochondria, but in the past few years, his doctor’s visits have changed. “If you’re a worrier like I am, or Ben,” he says, referring to Ben Stiller, the star of his 2010 movie Greenberg, “you’re used to going, ‘Is this something that should be cause for worry?'”
The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’ most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there are two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish.
When you’re young, to be old — even just the 44 kind of old — is unimaginable. Yet no one who has ever turned 44, or 54 or 74, can tell you how it happened. There’s no single moment of passing to the other side of the looking glass; the…
The screen version of any long-running comic-book superhero inevitably feels thin compared to the richly detailed idea of that hero in the minds of the fans who grew up with it. Five movies in, no Hollywood Spider-Man has yet embodied, all at once, the comic iteration’s glorious contradictions.
Country fans have Nashville. Hip-hop fans have Empire. And now, Latin American music fans have South Beach. Produced by Miami-based Dolphin Entertainment, Hulu’s upcoming musical soap opera, though fictional, is rooted in South Florida. Born from the desire to film a show in his hometown, Dolphin President and South Beach…
Furious 7 and While We’re Young are two very different movies — one’s all synchronized driving and explosions, the other’s all sorta-depressed New Yorkers who don’t drive — but both receive generally positive reviews from Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly,…
Mad Men has always been, among many other things, about the exit of the old guard and the entrance of the new — and the acceleration of that transition by the mood and the movements of the Sixties. The pilot, set in 1960, finds the Sterling Cooper higher-ups scrambling to…
You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry.
If you’ve ever played music or even just attempted to coax a pleasing sound from a keyboard or a guitar string, you may have some sense of the dissonant signals that the desire to make music can set off…
From Cane to Cannes: One letter makes all the difference, especially for University of Miami graduate and first-time director Tony Mendez. At the end of each academic year, UM’s film program hosts a film festival for all the student films (this year’s runs May 1-3 at the Bill Cosford Cinema),…
Love it or hate it, reality television is here to stay; and unfortunately, over the years Miami has been one of the genre’s favorite towns. Yeah, sorry about that, America. MTV gave us the greatness that was the Real World Miami in 1996, but it seems since then anyone and everyone…
The Golden Girls has been off the air since 1992, but this show about four women in their golden years remains fresh as ever. All that sharp, sassy, and sometimes crass as hell comedy keeps delighting audiences through reruns on TVLand, Hallmark, and YouTube. And as fictional residents of Miami,…
Get Hard, Etan Cohen’s comedy about a white stockbroker who hires a black man to prepare him for a ten-year stretch in San Quentin, is like a spoon that’s almost-but-not-yet sharpened into a shiv. With just a little more effort, it could kill. Judging by the poster, in which star…
The Amazing Randi insists that the public wants to be fooled, that it’s easier and more comforting for us not to see unromantic truths. You can see him proclaiming this, a little sadly, in Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom’s doc An Honest Liar, which plays like a companion piece to…
