Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro at Coral Gables Art Cinema
The Summer of Kurosawa (Kuro-summer?) continues at Coral Gables Art Cinema, with 4K restorations of many of the legendary director's major films. This month, we're highlighting three of his best samurai epics: the Shakespeare adaptation Throne of Blood, the action-packed Yojimbo, and its sequel Sanjuro.Our Take: As with Ran, Kurosawa's distinctive take on the doom and dread of Shakespearean tragedy — this time he takes on Macbeth — goes far beyond updating the setting to feudal Japan. Throne of Blood (the original title translates to "Spiderweb Castle") is one of the greatest film adaptations of the Bard, translating the play into an austere, spooky rendering of lust for power and paranoia that inspired later takes such as Joel Coen's recent The Tragedy of Macbeth. The famed climax, in which a manic Toshiro Mifune in the title role dodged real arrows, is worth the price of admission alone. 10 p.m. Thursday, August 7, and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, August 10.
Mifune also stars in Yojimbo and Sanjuro as a relentlessly clever and ruthlessly effective ronin warrior. Doing battle with a town full of gangsters in the former, and helping a samurai clan topple their corrupt chamberlain in the latter, the two films have proven profoundly influential, each in its own unique way. Film buffs know the story of Sergio Leone ripping off Yojimbo for his spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, but the blood splatter ending of Sanjuro, in which a malfunctioning special effect caused fake fluid to spurt from a slain character's costume, was a watershed moment in Japanese action cinema. Samurai films from this point on would be bathed in red, influencing future filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino. Yojimbo screens at 10 p.m. Thursday, August 21, and 3:30 p.m. Sunday, August 24. Sanjuro screens at 10 p.m. Thursday, August 28, and 1 p.m. Monday, September 1. Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.
"Drag Me to Pretty Woman" at Rooftop Cinema Club
Miami Beach's Rooftop Cinema Club partners with Drag Me to the Movies for a program combining Hollywood classics with drag performances. This month they're showing the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, directed by Garry Marshall and starring Julia Roberts in a star-making performance as an escort with a heart of gold and Richard Gere as the corporate raider who falls in love with her. Imagine Anora if Hollywood had its way with it and swapped all the gritty realism and class commentary with true romance and a fairy-tale happy ending. Sunday, August 10 at Rooftop Cinema Club South Beach, 1212 Lincoln Rd., Sixth Level, Miami Beach; rooftopcinemaclub.com. Tickets cost $27 to $35.Intro to Surrealism and Orpheus at Miami-Dade County Public Library
AV Club continues its look into surrealism in film with a pair of programs this month. First, on Saturday, August 16, "Intro to Surrealism" serves up a handful of movies from names you might associate mainly with paintings. Some of film's most influential works are on the bill, including Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's Ballet Mécanique, Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema, and Jean Cocteau's the Blood of a Poet. The following week doubles down on Cocteau with a screening of the Frenchman's wonderfully strange 1950 adaptation of the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Translating the story to postwar Paris, the second film in the poet's Orphic Trilogy casts his then-lover, legendary French screen star Jean Marais, as the title hero — a poet who descends into the underworld to save his wife. The film's magical imagery has inspired generations of filmmakers, such as Luca Guadagnino, who included scenes from it in last year's Queer. As always, the movies will be shown on prints from the library's impressive collection of 16mm films. Both events are free. 3 p.m. Saturday, August 16, and 3 p.m. Saturday, August 23, at the Miami-Dade County Main Library, 101 W Flagler St., Miami; 305-375-2665; mdpls.org.
La Haïne at O Cinema South Beach
Countless streetwear collabs and even a musical adaptation have done little to dull the impact of La Haïne ("Hatred"). One of the greatest films ever made about race relations and police brutality in the modern-day West, Mathieu Kassovitz's gritty 1995 drama will screen at O Cinema this month for its 30th anniversary.Our Take: As explosive, bleak, and unsparing today as it was three decades ago, La Haïne drops us straight into the banlieue, the suburban ghettos of Paris inhabited mostly by Arab and Black African immigrants. We follow a trio of friends — Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), respectively of Jewish, West African, and Maghrebi heritage — as they bounce around town, united by aimlessness, anger, and camaraderie. Stylishly filmed in stark black and white, a choice that resonates thematically with the informal segregation of the French capital, Kassovitz populates this harsh corner of the world with hip-hop, gangster movies, and seething resentment of its characters, all of whom are still reeling from the murder of their friend by racist cops and the riots that resulted. An unbearable tension permeates the film as the characters await an inevitable conflagration. It's not a matter of if, but when violence breaks out again, and when it does, it's as shocking as it is tragic. 7 p.m. Thursday, August 21, at O Cinema South Beach, 1130 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; o-cinema.org. Tickets cost $10 to $12.50.
Magnolia at Coral Gables Art Cinema
A new Paul Thomas Anderson film is a cinephile's version of the Olympics: a drop-everything event that comes around every four years or so. So it's best to get ready for PTA's new thriller One Battle After Another before it arrives next month by watching the vaunted director's intimate epic Magnolia at Coral Gables Art Cinema. Tracking a large cast of troubled Angelenos across a single day that ends in a fantastic, inexplicable event, the film's length (more than three hours), ambitious interconnected plot, and confident earnestness have earned it cult status despite not being as popular as some of his other films, like There Will Be Blood. Magnolia also features one of the greatest-ever Tom Cruise roles, with the movie star portraying the pick-up artist Frank T.J. Mackey, a proto-Andrew Tate with a surprising secret. 9:30 p.m. Saturday, August 23, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.Call Me By Your Name at O Cinema South Beach
As part of its Queer as Cult series, O Cinema will screen the tender bisexual romance that launched director Luca Guadagnino and star Timothée Chalamet into Hollywood's A-list. Watch Call Me By Your Name to prepare for Guadagnino's upcoming cancel culture drama After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, and Andrew Garfield. Our Take: Based on the novel by André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name chronicles one glorious summer in the life of Elio (Chalamet), the 17-year-old son of an archeology professor (Michael Stuhlbarg). Though he already has a girlfriend, he becomes infatuated with his father's assistant, a handsome, blond American grad student named Oliver (Armie Hammer). Among the sun-dappled hills of Lombardy, a crush turns into a physical tryst. But will it last through the season? With its bucolic vision of queer romance and picturesque '80s Italian setting, Call Me By Your Name was a cultural phenomenon upon release — who could forget that scene with the peach? — but it also remains a gorgeously made, beautifully sensitive coming-of-age story. 7 p.m. Thursday, August 28, at O Cinema South Beach, 1130 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; o-cinema.org. Tickets cost $10 to $12.50.
The Room, Hosted by Greg Sestero at Coral Gables Art Cinema
The best worst movie ever made is back in Miami. Director Tommy Wiseau's legendary cinematic clunker The Room is returning to Coral Gables Art Cinema for the first time since 2018. Cast member Greg Sestero has turned the film into a rollicking live road show, and he'll be on hand as master of ceremonies. The theater will also screen the Miami premiere of Wiseau and Sestero's latest flick, the New Orleans-set monster movie Big Shark. Our Take: "Worst movie ever" might be an overblown label for The Room. By any measure, it's not a well-made film: It looks cheap, the plot is bizarre and inscrutable, and the performances from Wiseau and the handful of no-name actors are a mix of comically inept and making the best of a bad situation. Watching it is certainly a useful way to study what not to do in the director's chair. But there's entertainment value, at least. Much like Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis, a terrible movie that cost a hundred times as much as The Room to make, the film is relentlessly quotable ("You are tearing me apart, Lisa!") and shamelessly ridiculous. Can a movie that guarantees a good time at the theater be truly bad? Attend this screening to find out. 11 p.m. Saturday, August 30, and 8:15 p.m. Sunday, August 31, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.
Past August Screenings:
"Slamdance Unstoppable: On the Road" at O Cinema
O Cinema has reopened its doors after a brief closure for renovation. The Miami Beach arthouse will start August with a series of films from Slamdance Unstoppable, showcasing filmmakers with disabilities, whose stories are less often told in mainstream cinema. According to IndieWire, 40 percent of ticket sales will go directly to the filmmakers. The series includes the following documentaries, each preceded by a short film: Loud Love, which follows a deaf gay couple attempting to build a family through international surrogacy when other options fail. Directed by Bing Wang. 7 p.m. Friday, August 1.
Life After investigates the life and legacy of Elizabeth Bouvia, a pioneer of the assisted dying movement who vanished from public view after years of activism. Directed by Reid Davenport, winner of the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. 7 p.m. Saturday, August 2.
Disposable Humanity examines the Nazi extermination program T4 Aktion, which declared people with disabilities "life unworthy of living" and served as a forerunner to the broader program of genocide now known as the Holocaust. Directed by Cameron S. Mitchell. 7 p.m. Sunday, August 3. O Cinema, 1130 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; o-cinema.org. Tickets cost $10 to $12.50.
Barry Lyndon 4K Restoration at Gables
Barry Lyndon has had a strange journey over the last few decades. Once considered a lesser film in Stanley Kubrick's oeuvre, the 1975 period masterpiece has grown in esteem (in part thanks to a legendary fancam edit set to 21 Savage's "A Lot") to the point that its reputation arguably rivals The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Barry Lyndon has been restored in 4K and will screen for one afternoon only at Coral Gables Art Cinema. This is a presentation few cinephiles will want to miss. Our Take: That 21 Savage edit does hint at Barry Lyndon's deceptively cutthroat sensibility: Beneath the frilly garments and grand architecture is a rags-to-riches tale of one devious Irishman's blood-soaked ambition, taking him from the battlefields of the Seven Years' War to the country manors of the English nobility. Along with the excitement of learning "By What Means Redmond Barry Acquired the Style and Title of Barry Lyndon," Kubrick packs the film with such sumptuous imagery that every frame looks like a historical painting. The legendarily exacting director famously shot the film entirely with natural light, resulting in an aesthetic that feels authentic without sacrificing an inch of beauty. 1:30 p.m. Saturday, August 2 at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.
