The Best Movies You Can Only See in Miami in November

This month, Miami movie theaters are full of cinematic riches. From restored anime classics to vintage thrillers and the darkest holiday movie you’ll probably ever see, there’s something for everyone. Plus, the alt-cinema specialists at Subtropic Film Festival are about to give you more than enough reasons to take a day trip. Here, in chronological order, are our picks for the best movies to see this month in Miami.

Subtropic Film Festival

Ok, so this one’s not in Miami. But if you fancy a trip to Palm Beach, Subtropic Film Festival is back with a slate of films celebrating Florida in all its weird and wonderful forms. The lineup includes everything from acclaimed environmental docs (Python Hunt, River of Grass) to artsy-fartsy films about artists (Florida Boys, Beach Towel Art Show) to shorts that are a bit, uh, baked (High Minded, This Edible Ain’t Sh*t). Parties, workshops, and talks are also in store. For the most part, the festival takes place at Afflux Studios, with select screenings also held at the Norton Museum of Art. Friday, November 7 through Sunday, November 9 at Afflux Studios, 2060 S. Congress Ave., Palm Springs; and the Norton Museum of Art, 1450 S. Dixie Hwy., West Palm Beach; subtropic.org. Tickets cost $10 to $30 via zeffy.com.

Thief 4K Restoration at Coral Gables Art Cinema

An excellent After Hours lineup at Coral Gables Art Cinema this month will be led off by a 4K restoration of one of Michael Mann’s most beloved films, the neon-drenched 1981 heist thriller, Thief. If you thought the recent Louvre robbery was an exciting story, wait ’til you see this. 

Our Take: A few years before he changed the face of television (and our fair city) with Miami Vice, Michael Mann made his feature film directorial debut with this propulsive crime drama starring James Caan as one of the coolest, most uncompromising protagonists in Hollywood cinema. Frank (Caan) is an ex-con safecracker attempting to chart a path on the straight and narrow. Pressured into taking a high-pressure heist by a Chicago mob boss, he soon comes to find that getting out of bed with gangsters is harder than getting in.

Anchored by a powerfully kinetic score from synth wizards Tangerine Dream, the film was Mann’s Hollywood calling card, a ferocious piece of filmmaking in which his intelligent scripting, stylistic preoccupations with light and shadow, and thematic focus on masculinity came to fruition. Caan plays one of his most indelible roles as Frank, an iconoclast who even confronts the mobsters with Marxian economics when they try to rope him into another score: “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor.” The fact that that line made it into an American studio film in 1981 is a miracle. The fact that it came wrapped in such a masterful character study is something else entirely. 10 p.m. Saturday, November 8, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $11.75.

AV Club: Metropolis on 16mm at Main Library

AV Club’s German Expressionism in Film series continues with a landmark in science fiction, Fritz Lang’s pioneering silent epic Metropolis. The film will screen on a 16mm archival print from the Miami-Dade County Public Library that likely predates some recent restorations and therefore may not contain the full film. 

Our Take: It may be 98 years old, but Metropolis still feels as futuristic and prescient as it did in 1927. Set in a futuristic city of skyscrapers and highways, the story follows a politician’s idealistic son and a kind-hearted working-class woman as they attempt to destroy the system of ruthless exploitation that keeps the city divided along class lines, a plot structure that saw the film censored by the Nazis a decade later. Uncompromising in his artistic vision, director Fritz Lang spent a fortune on the film, shooting for 17 months and building the elaborate sets and special effects that have made it an icon of cinema and science fiction history, from the robotic Maschinenmensch (“Machine-man”) to the biblical and religious allusions in the city’s architecture. The result is a staggering feat of early cinema that puts even contemporary blockbusters to shame and continues to inspire today’s artists. 2 p.m. Saturday, November 15, at Main Library, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami; 305-375-2665; mdpls.org. Admission is free.

Eyes Wide Shut at Coral Gables Art Cinema

Just in time for the holiday season, Coral Gables Art Cinema’s After Hours program is showing one of the most twisted Christmas movies of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s psychosexual drama, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Our Take: These days, you don’t have to look very far for stories about the world being controlled by a sinister cabal of wealthy sexual predators. But Eyes Wide Shut, which predated the revelations of the Jeffrey Epstein scandals by several years at least, still manages to be as unsettling and provocative as ever, perhaps even more so now that the gossip around then-married stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — both of whom are perfectly cast — that plagued the film’s release has abated.

Stanley Kubrick’s final film guides us through a strange underworld of sensual transgression as seen through the voyeuristic eyes of bourgeois New York doctor Bill Hartford (Cruise), suddenly provoked by the banal fantasies of infidelity confessed by his wife Alice (Kidman). But he digs too deep and, in a famed sequence, accidentally infiltrates a masquerade orgy run by an elite secret society. The rupture this causes in the film is terrifying, perhaps the most disturbing thing Kubrick ever filmed; even more so than The Shining, whose scares have been made inert by years of memes. Watching this feels wrong, as if we, the audience, have broken the same bounds as Bill. If The Shining feels like a ghost story told well, Eyes Wide Shut feels like walking in on your parents having sex — you weren’t supposed to see that, and now you’re scarred for life. 10 p.m. Saturday, November 15, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $11.75.

Our Take: There are two living souls wandering the desolate world of this film, a shadowy ruined city of vaguely European architecture: A girl with pallid skin and white hair who cradles a large egg of unknown origin, and a boy, a child soldier who carries a cross-shaped weapon. The girl seeks to hatch the egg. The boy wishes to crack it open. Only one will fulfill their wish.

Even in the context of anime’s golden era in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Angel’s Egg was a strange and commercially fraught project anchored by two legends in the making. Though the film’s frigid reception in Japan briefly tanked Oshii’s career, he would go on to direct Ghost in the Shell, while art director Yoshitaka Amano would become globally famous for his work on the Final Fantasy video games. Their work may not have succeeded at the time, but its spellbinding visuals, fluid and highly detailed animation, allegorical storytelling, and mournful, Tarkovsky-esque tone make it, without exaggeration, one of the masterworks of a bygone era of hand-drawn animation, and a film that must be experienced in the theater. 9 p.m. (subbed) and 11 p.m. (dubbed) Wednesday, November 19, and Thursday, November 20, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $11.75.