The first week of the 31st Miami International Film Festival kicks off Friday at the Olympia Theater at the Gusman Center (174 E. Flagler St., Miami). The opulent venue will host the North American premiere of Elsa & Fred, starring Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, who will attend the screening…
In 2006, the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, a project founded in Cambridge and cosupported by the Miami-based One Laptop per Child Association, implemented a project to give laptop computers to children in developing countries. The culture shock of people in locations without running water but possible internet connectivity…
Club Sandwich goes places that will feel very real to any survivor of the gauntlet of puberty. It has no shame exploring — and lingering on — some of the most common, if not sordid, moments many remember but few ever wish to recall. Be warned: The awkwardness quotient has…
Remember turning 31 years old? If you’re old enough, maybe you partied hard enough that you don’t recall. If you’re too young, it’s surely not a number you’re very concerned about achieving. For the Miami International Film Festival, the 31st anniversary is shaping up to be a year to remember…
Whittling down a film festival of close to 100 films to only 10 seems rather cruel. But, let’s face it, this is Miami, and who really wants to spend 10 days in dark theaters all day long? If you have to choose a smattering of movies to catch at the…
Remember turning 31 years old? If you’re old enough, maybe you partied hard enough that you don’t recall. If you’re too young, it’s surely not a number you’re very concerned about achieving. For the Miami International Film Festival, the 31st anniversary is shaping up to be a year to remember…
Indie Film Club Miami hosts another of its unique talent shows this month. Springing off from the idea that International Women’s Day arrives March 8, this month’s I’m Not Gonna Move to LA is the Women Director Edition. Diliana Alexander, executive director of Indie Film Club Miami, calls the event…
Comparisons to Romeo and Juliet are unfair. The Oscar-nominated foreign language film Omar has something much more complex than star-crossed lovers under its surface. Set in the dangerous West Bank, a territory cut in half by a humongous wall, the titular character scales said obstacle to meet the leader of…
Nowadays, with video on demand, iPads that stream Netflix, and — God forgive the bootleggers — torrent files, the experience of going to the movies has become, as David Lynch has called it, “a horror show.” However, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens has maintained an ongoing film series called Viewing Vizcaya,…
There was a time when Sam Beam, the creative force behind Iron & Wine, was more famous as a film professor than a musician. His main gig was teaching students at a South Florida postsecondary institution about film history and cinematography. “Now it’s like the Art Institute of Everywhere,” Beam…
Though the Miami International Film Festival’s opening night is still a month away, today’s the day that probably makes festival director Jaie Laplante most restless: the day tickets go on sale to members. “I’m anxious to see how they respond to the program,” he said speaking via phone, earlier this…
With 30 years of festivals in its past, the Miami International Film Festival will mark the start of its fourth decade with some changes. It’s been a gradual growth process to bigger and better things since festival director Jaie Laplante took the helm of the festival in 2011. “Last year…
If you didn’t know opening night for the Miami Jewish Film Festival was Thursday, you would have thought the festival had already begun. The 17th year for the MJFF sees a new director so eager to start his job, he has already held more than a dozen screenings. “We have…
For the first time in ten years, the Miami Jewish Film Festival has a new director, and though opening night for the 17th Annual MJFF has yet to arrive, Igor Shteyrenberg has wasted no time in holding screenings. Since he accepted the job in July of 2013, Shteyrenberg has hosted…
By the time Cultist gets its 15 minutes on the phone with Australian actress Margot Robbie, she admits to having lost count of how many interviews she has done that day regarding her high-profile role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. “We’re probably in our 30s or something,”…
Spanish director Antonia San Juan does not hold back her criticism of the oppressive, suffocating extended family. Not in her new film, The Summer Side (Del Otro Lado Del Verano), which screens at O Cinema Miami Shores tonight, nor in real life. The film, San Juan’s second feature, follows an…
Thirteen-year-old Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse is flicking paper airplanes across the windowless conference room of the Ritz-Carlton Miami Beach when Cultist walks in to meet her and British director Brian Percival. Percival, best known as the Emmy-winning director of many episodes of Downton Abbey, and Nélisse are at the end…
When we here at Crossfade rang up Jon Anderson, the founding member and iconic voice of the pioneering English prog rock band Yes, we thought that we’d reached his secretary. “It’s me,” he responds, swinging the words heavenward and high. He confesses that he is grocery shopping near his home…
Kurt Vile likes to weave a lot of subtle texture through his songs. It can be as simple as the squeak his fingertips make by rubbing the nylon strings on the neck of his acoustic guitar. Or it can be as other-worldly as an electric pulse from a Moog phaser…
Kurt Vile has to be one of the more down-to-earth musicians currently working the indie rock scene. From his Philadelphia home, tending to his 1-year-old baby girl, the youngest of his two daughters, he is a breeze to talk with. The 33-year-old Vile has no problem entertaining questions about creative…
The term singer-songwriter conjures images of musicians in coffee houses with classically tuned acoustic guitars, strumming open chords to overly earnest lyrics. But since leaving his former band War on Drugs to go solo, Kurt Vile has consistently subverted the stereotype with experimental atmospherics. This signature sonic approach can be…
It sounds like an intriguing premise. Sergio (Fele Martínez), an aspiring screenwriter/director, has written a script for a western, but it keeps getting rejected. He’s told it feels ham-fisted and hollow. One would-be producer tells him it lacks a believable, lived-in quality. So Sergio leaves his cowboy-decorated apartment (Playmobil toys…
