Astroll along the Miami River one recent Sunday evening didn’t seem particularly promising. The rains had subsided, the river flowed calmly, nothing much disturbed the slumber of a rusting freighter slouched along the north bank. Over at Tobacco Road, the regulars were huddled over beers, largely ignoring a boxing match…
Get ready to sit. The busy summer film season in Miami continues with two remarkable events. The FIU-Miami International Film Festival will present the area premiere of Apocalypse Now Redux, the long-awaited director’s cut of the acclaimed Vietnam War film by Francis Ford Coppola. The multi-award winner featured those performances…
Summertime supposedly is the slow season in South Florida, but you wouldn’t know it from the sudden explosion of film news and events happening or about to happen around Miami. There doesn’t appear to be a specific reason for this cineblitz, but the situation suggests both the pros and cons…
Up for a quick trip across the United States? If you can’t spare the time and gas money, an alternative might be the “road” movies currently screening as part of the Reel America Film Series at the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami Beach. The idea behind the minifestival is to “explore travel…
Things seem to come in waves in South Florida. We have hurricane season, snowbird season, and come spring, film-festival season. There seem to be dozens of them, rolling in with the regularity of summer thunderstorms. Next up is the seventeenth Israel Film Festival, a presentation of Israel’s latest cinematic fare…
Excuse me, but can somebody explain the movie world’s fascination with Las Vegas? The town without p(ersonal)ity crops up year after year as Hollywood’s favorite location. It’s not as though Las Vegas has some kind of special energy. There are tawdry casinos and cruising cars and neon nightscapes all over…
This year’s Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival concludes with the South Florida premiere of Susan Seidelman’s Gaudi Afternoon, an entertaining mystery-comedy. Headlined by the always excellent Judy Davis, the cast includes champs such as Marcia Gay Harden, Christopher Bown, Lili Taylor, and Juliette Lewis. Imagine a cinematic cross between…
Ah, summer love! Most adults can hark back to the days of their youth, especially that first wild, unforgettable rush of sexuality. Many stories try to capture those breathless moments: the first kiss, the first love, the awakening of desire. Imagine a picture-perfect Spanish beach town, pleasant summer weather, and…
What exactly is a gay film? A film about gay characters? A film by gay filmmakers? Or is gay cinema a marketing construct to attract a niche audience for a film in trouble? The last of these appears to be the correct answer when it comes to Julie Johnson, a…
Chinese cinema has long been at the forefront of modern moviemaking, but widespread recognition of this fact has been a long time coming, at least in the United States. Although enthusiasm for Hong Kong-style kung fu movies dates to Bruce Lee in the Seventies, such fervor generally has been derided…
Want to make a movie? Get a big house, preferably in a beautiful rural setting, gather a group of good-looking actors, and photograph them wandering around, discussing life and death. No, we’re not talking about The Big Chill or Enchanted April or Howard’s End or a dozen other successful films…
The festival closes as it began with an adaptation of an early twentieth-century novel by Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defence, a disappointing finale to what has been a very strong program overall. The film follows an obsessed Russian chess master, Alexander Luzhin (John Turturro), who in the late 1920s arrives…
There are many striking aspects to Patrice Leconte’s vivid, powerful film The Widow of St. Pierre, which screens this week at the Miami Film Festival, but the most unusual is the central relationship between a French army officer and his wife — a marriage based on passion, admiration, intimacy, and…
Brazilian cinema has to be one of the most underrated sources in today’s movie industry, at least from an American perspective. While Hollywood troglodytes are only now waking up to the pleasures of Latin filmmaking, studio-level attention largely is focused on Spain and stories that can be considered “crossover.” One…
On Golden PonderingLet us now praise famous filmmakers, specifically the lauded team of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant, whose latest film, The Golden Bowl, headlines the Miami Film Festival. In forty years and seventeen theatrical productions, this team has compiled a superlative record of finely wrought films, almost…
Film has always turned to classic literature for inspiration, but rare is the film adaptation that dodges the Scylla and Charybdis of the trade: too much reverence leads to inert moviemaking, too little results in parody. In Time Regained Chilean director Raoul Ruiz has taken on the Mount Everest of…
Quick, what gonzo visionary is a prime inspiration for many American directors, including Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and Julie Taymor? The answer is Jan Svankmajer, an obscure Czech puppet master and filmmaker whose latest feature, Otesánek, makes its Florida premiere (and second U.S. screening) at the Mercury Theatre on Saturday,…
Documentaries have been out of fashion in the film world, though exactly what a documentary is remains debatable, at least in Hollywood circles. (Roger and Me and The Thin Blue Line did not qualify for Oscar consideration, according to the rules.) Whatever you want to call these offerings from the…
There’s bound to be a philosopher somewhere who has offered the opinion that banality, if marketed well enough, becomes the model of success. Given the spew of mediocrity that’s hyped in the media, that theory is a reasonable assumption. But there’s a corollary that’s worse. If it hasn’t been hyped,…
Happy hooker? Femme fatale? Damsel in distress? The movies have always been fascinated with prostitutes. Most films generally portray them as resourceful, often wise and amusing, and somewhat scary, using sex in ways that both amaze and titillate (from Blue Angel on through Mighty Aphrodite). The sordid aspects of the…
At first glance Paragraph 175, a documentary by Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, doesn’t appear to be must-see moviegoing. Epstein and Friedman are well-known award-winning documentarians with a string of notable successes: The Celluloid Closet, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and The Life and Times of Harvey Milk among…
The past month or so hasn’t been good for the local film scene. The death of the venerable Alliance Cinema in South Beach was a decided blow to independent film programming in South Florida. Combined with a few months without much film festival activity or many special screenings, the area’s…
