When he was taking his girlfriend to the movies in Kendall, screenwriter Mark Perez never thought he would one day be writing scripts for big-time Hollywood studios. The Sunset High grad says his best memories of going to high school in Kendall were movie nights at either the now-defunct AMC in what was then called Kendall Town & Country Mall (now the Palms at Town & Country) or the Falls’ United Artists, which is now owned by Regal Cinemas.

Few movie buffs ever consider the relationship between the filmmaker and the filmworker. The first is often recognized above a movie’s title — names like Spielberg and Coppola. The other is the anonymous grunt on set often unknown to the common moviegoer. In fact, the term “filmworker” corresponds to a role so unacknowledged…

In the latest movie by Paul Thomas Anderson, Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis plays Reynolds Woodcock, a dress designer in 1950s London. As you might guess, the film’s costume designer is especially important for such a movie. Mark Bridges, who has worked with Anderson since the director’s first movie in 1996, says he felt no added pressure from the subject matter in his task for the movie.

Any frequenter of Books & Books knows the local chain’s owner, Mitchell Kaplan. The Miami-based bookseller has 35 years of experience expanding his business throughout South Florida while national chains such as Waldenbooks and Borders failed. Few, however, know that Kaplan is one-half of the TV and film production firm the Mazur/Kaplan Company, which has now released its first theatrical movie.

The Miami Film Festival’s mini film festival event, Gems, returns for a fourth year this week. The festival has long catered to Miami’s Spanish-speaking audience, bringing films from Latin America as well as Spain to Tower Theater. New Times was granted a preview of two films from Spain that would…

When Jason Fitzroy Jeffers shows up for a late breakfast to discuss the second-annual Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival in the wake of Hurricane Irma, he’s rocking some puffy bags under his eyes. It’s been a rough two weeks for the festival’s cofounder/director and his crew of collaborators — an…

In the face of last year’s loss of state incentives for entertainment production in Florida, Miami-Dade County has stepped up to offer a program that hopes to fill the gap locally. On Tuesday, commissioners voted to approve a rebate valued at $100,000 to productions shooting in Miami-Dade…

It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday, and the Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove is but a sleepy ghost of drug-addled days past. Isis Masoud, a tall, pretty, expectant mother with clear brown eyes that almost match her rusty-brown hair, sits on a gold vinyl couch stacked with embroidered pillows in…

Scarface is indisputably one of the greatest movies shot in Miami. It was inspired in part by the city’s cocaine epidemic of the ’70s and ’80s. It included characters who had arrived here via the Mariel Boatlift. And its remake will soon be casting in, of all places, Atlanta.

For Jeff Friday, the Oscar-winning success of Moonlight, a film shot in Miami by a black director and starring an all-black cast, hardly means anything has changed for African-Americans in the movie business. “I don’t really see Moonlight’s success as being an indication of Hollywood’s appetite for black cinema, because…

Choosing the greatest films shot in Miami seems like a straightforward undertaking. Simply look for the most popular movies that include some of the Magic City’s most iconic locations, right? But not all films set in Miami were actually made here. More than one James Bond movie was set in the 305, including Thunderball, whose plot called for blowing up the city.

An interview with the director of the new luxury movie theater, CMX, set to open at Brickell City Centre at the end of April.

The Miami Film Festival event Straight Out of Miami: Rakontur Previews New Work, which took place at Regal South Beach, began with the most pressing question of the night. Festival documentary programmer Thom Powers asked Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman: “What the fuck have you been doing?”

There is probably no better place for the world premiere of Bahamian filmmaker Kareem J. Mortimer’s latest movie than the Miami Film Festival. With a cast and crew representing an array of islands in the Caribbean, Cargo focuses on an American exile with a gambling addiction in Nassau who takes a job smuggling Haitians to Florida in a desperate act to support his family.

The Miami Film Festival (MIFF), this city’s biggest annual movie event, returns Friday with 131 films, complemented by dozens of parties, talks, and special events. That’s a lot to pack into just ten days. Let New Times’ film critics guide you through this week’s best experiences. Desserts & Directors: MIFF…

It was shock, confusion, and joy as a floppy antenna faltered during Moonlight’s best-picture Oscar win at Liberty City’s block party for the only officially sanctioned Moonlight Oscars viewing party, at the African Heritage Cultural Center.