Below, find our most-anticipated MFF choices alongside a magical realist adventure from Italy, a major restoration of a French gangster classic, and rom-com and superhero classics from early-2000s Hollywood.
Catch Mountains on Sunday, April 7, as part of the 41st Miami Film Festival.
Photo courtesy of Miami Film Festival
Mountains at Miami Film Festival
Local filmmaker Monica Sorelle recently won a Film Independent Spirit Award for Mountains, her elegant first feature set within Miami's tight-knit Haitian-American community. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) is a demolition man and first-generation immigrant living in Little Haiti with his wife (Sheila Anozier) and adult son (Chris Renois). Working hard to fulfill his dream of exchanging their tiny home for a bigger house in the neighborhood, he almost fails to notice the mysterious phone calls, new neighbors, and other harbingers of gentrification creeping in — that is, until his demolition crew starts tearing down homes just beyond his doorstep. With excellent performances from a mostly nonprofessional cast (including local artist Roscoe B. Thické as Xavier's co-worker), Mountains is an authentic portrayal of a community at risk, calling into question the true nature of the American Dream. Sorelle will give a Q&A after the screening. A short film by Diana Larrea, Querido Pequeño Haiti, will precede the showing. In English, Kreyòl, and Spanish with English subtitles. 7 p.m. Sunday, April 7, at the Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami; miamifilmfestival.com. Tickets cost $23 via arshtcenter.org.
Resident Orca, directed by Sarah Sharkey Pierce and Simon Schneider, is competing for the Made in MIA Award.
Everyday Films photo
Resident Orca at Miami Film Festival
With the controversy over the Miami Seaquarium's squalid conditions still ongoing amid Miami-Dade County's efforts to evict the embattled aquarium, this inadvertently ripped-from-the-headlines documentary by two Canadian directors, Sarah Sharkey Pearce and Simon Schneider, focuses on its most famous resident, the orca whale Lolita. Resident Orca follows efforts by a group of activists and philanthropists, led by members of the indigenous Lhaq'temish people in Washington State, to rescue Lolita (AKA Tokitae) from decades of captivity in the Seaquarium's infamous concrete tank and return her to her ancestral waters. Yet, as Toki's heath fades, the film transforms into a document of her final days. Sharing DNA with previous marine life documentaries such as Blackfish and The Cove, Resident Orca will surely resonate with generations of South Floridians who watched Lolita's shows, blissfully unaware of the inhumanity behind it all. 3:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6, at Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE Third St., Miami; 305-536-5000; silverspot.net; and 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 9, at Regal South Beach, 1120 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach; 844-462-7342; regmovies.com. Tickets cost $14.50 to $15.50 via miamifilmfestival2024.eventive.org.
The Concierge is the only animated feature screening at the Miami Film Festival this year.
Crunchyroll photo
The Concierge at Miami Film Festival
As anyone who's ever worked in service knows, customers can be real animals, but The Concierge, the only animated feature screening at MFF this year, takes that literally. Akino starts her new job at the Hokkyoku Department Store, a shopping destination for extinct and endangered species. Between demanding customers and the high standards of her employers, the human girl gets much more than she bargained for, but the happiness she provides for her furry and feathered clients drives her to keep going. Sumptuously animated by legendary studio Production I.G under veteran director Yoshimi Itazu, The Concierge is both a tribute to Japan's legendary culture of hospitality, exemplified by its luxury department stores, and a heartwarming, funny fish-out-of-water tale. In Japanese with English subtitles. 7 p.m. Friday, April 12, at Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE Third St., Miami; 305-536-5000; silverspot.net. Tickets cost $14.50 to $15.50 via miamifilmfestival2024.eventive.org.Spider-Mondays at Various Theaters
Apparently, the box-office bomb of Madame Web was so severe that Sony Pictures decided to press a big red button at their supervillain headquarters and re-release every Spider-Man film back in theaters. Dubbed "Spider-Mondays," the series will screen every Spider-Man movie in release order, starting with the original Toby Maguire-starring trilogy this month. Those three films from the 2000s are the best of the franchise, thanks to director Sam Raimi. Influenced by his time working on horror films like the Evil Dead series and pulpy superhero flicks like Darkman, Raimi's intense directing style lends the trilogy an almost gothic sense of drama that's vanished from today's comic book movies.That horror streak is quite evident in Spider-Man 2, far and away the pinnacle of the franchise. The terrifying, gory creation of Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) remains one of the scariest moments from plenty of millennial childhoods, and the extended action sequence of Spidey nearly sacrificing his life to save a runaway subway train is equally iconic. If you only have time to see one of these films, Spider-Man 2 is the one most deserving of a revisit. Monday, April 15; Monday, April 22; and Monday, April 29; at select local theaters. For tickets and listings, visit spideymovies.com.
Le Samouraï 4K Restoration at Coral Gables Art Cinema
One of, if not the greatest crime films of all time, Le Samouraï is the pinnacle of a brilliant partnership between two legends of French cinema, director Jean-Pierre Melville and iconic leading man Alain Delon (Purple Noon, La Piscine, The Leopard). Casting his star actor into a bleak Parisian cityscape of blue and steel gray, Melville tells the story of Jef Costello, a hired gun who will kill anyone for the right price. After landing in police custody after assassinating a nightclub owner, Costello is mysteriously let go when a witness lies to the cops about seeing him. More mysteries pile up when his employers try to cut loose ends, and the hitman must figure out who wants who dead before it's too late.It's no secret that Le Samouraï is deeply influential. Francis Ford Coppola took clear influence from the film's sophisticated portrait of organized crime in planning The Godfather a few years later; legendary Hong Kong director John Woo once said of his fellow auteur, "Melville is God to me." Melville fought the Nazis in the French resistance before becoming a filmmaker, and that may be why his films, minimal and restrained yet still deeply evocative, so effectively convey the restraints of masculine honor. In Le Samouraï, Delon's hard-boiled gangster hero, like the samurai from which the film takes its title, lives by a certain code. Amoral, unconcerned with the letter of the law, it's a secret to all but himself. Yet he follows it nonetheless, and as he learns by the end of the film, following such a code may be a matter of life or death. Presented in a brand-new 4K restoration, this screening of an all-time classic is a must-attend. In French with English subtitles. 8:45 p.m. Thursday, April 25, and 9:45 p.m. Friday, April 26, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $11 to $12.75.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at Savor Cinema
Love has never been easy, but nowadays, it seems harder than ever. Dating apps and changing social mores in the post-COVID world have turned courtship into a challenging uphill climb. So few people actually meet their partners IRL nowadays that a scene like the one that opens Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) meet cute on a snowy train platform in the middle of February, seems completely mythological. Of course, there's more to the story: Unbeknownst to the two, they've already met, fallen in love, and broken up. And neither remembers any of it because they've had their memories of each other erased.Applying a Philip K. Dick-esque premise to the then-crowded romantic comedy genre, 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has become a crowd-pleasing classic. That's due in part to the creativity of director Michel Gondry, who applies his homemade aesthetic and inventive camera movements to Charlie Kaufman's brilliant yet potentially confusing script, which jumps throughout time as we explore Joel's mind and memories. The film also deserves credit for making Clementine a more complicated love interest than the typical manic-pixie dreamgirls of this era and for its side-plot showing the flaws and foibles of the memory-erasing Lacuna company's less-than-ethical employees. Love may be harder than ever to find, but as Eternal Sunshine's ending shows, it's not worth forgetting once you find it, no matter how painful and difficult it may be. 9 p.m. Friday, April 26, at Savor Cinema, 503 SE Sixth St., Fort Lauderdale; 954-545-3456; fliff.com. Tickets cost $9 via fliff.com.
La Chimera at Coral Gables Art Cinema
Northern Italy, 1980s. A merry band of tombineri (grave robbers) is plundering the tombs of the ancient Etruscans, stealing the artifacts that once carried the dead of their civilizational ancestors to the next world and selling them to a seedy art dealer. At their center is "the maestro," Arthur (Josh O'Connor, soon to star in Luca Guadagnino's tennis drama Challengers). An English archaeologist fallen on hard times, he possesses a unique gift: With a dowsing rod and his supernatural intuition, he reveals the ancient crypts. But Arthur is not happy with his work. Grief-stricken by the loss of a beloved and guilt-wracked for exposing the glories of antiquity to the grubby hands of petty thieves, his true motive for diving into the tombs remains mysterious. He's searching for something, but what?La Chimera is the latest film from auteur Alice Rohrwacher (Happy as Lazzaro). She herself is from Italy, where the ruins of long-dead civilizations are prevalent to the point of nuisance. (Rome, for instance, can't expand its subway without running into a long-buried villa or temple every five feet.) Rather than express shock and dismay at the grave robbing, she imbues the world of the film with a sense of humor and magical realism that feels unique — and uniquely Italian, combining Fellini-esque fantasia with Pasolini's grit and interest in the Italian lower classes. Comparisons to Indiana Jones, a graverobber of a more heroic stripe, are unavoidable. The Italian setting of Call Me By Your Name comes to mind, as does the anguished drama of Egyptian classic Al Momia, another film about the ethics of raiding tombs and stealing from the long dead. There's also clever cinematography from Hélène Louvart, whose Chaplin-esque high-speed shots and head-turning, upside-down camerawork add a hint of whimsy those films lack. Anchored by two powerful presences in O'Connor, whose surly Arthur resembles an English caveman stomping through the gentle campagna, and a nearly unrecognizable Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet) as the aging mother of Arthur's lost love, La Chimera is a beguiling, mysterious film that will reveal its secrets to those that want to see them. Friday, April 26, through Thursday, May 2, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $11 to $12.75.
