Arts & Culture

A movie about bringing down druglords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar American audiences could probably follow it without subtitles. (It’s in French — add that to the title, and you get a sense of its police-film ambitions.)

What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary aural signals are processed on their journey through ear canal to eardrum and beyond.

When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy.

Twenty years ago, at the height of the UFO boom, the truest believers in alien abduction scenarios would argue that their most compelling evidence was the commonalities between regular people’s stories of nighttime visitations. Even under hypnosis, “abductees” testified to remarkably consistent waking-dream terrors…

The irony behind the innocence of much of The Beach Boys music is that the band’s main songwriter, Brian Wilson, was in fact insane. He has long admitted that voices inside his head inspired his music, and he was driven by a perfectionist’s OCD to do those voices justice. So…

Good or bad, Cameron Crowe movies build to improbable declarations of sincerity, to the great acts or speeches a man must loose from himself into a world too cynical to value them. His heroes always must filibuster regular life with their decency. Superficially, these acts and speeches are performed in…

A witty comedy from Spain will have its U.S. premiere at Coral Gables Art Cinema this Friday. The red carpet will be rolled out for director/writer/lead actor, Daniel Castro, who will make a personal appearance for the event. Ilusión, Castro’s feature debut, takes aim at the world of popular filmmaking on…

The San Andreas fault stretches 810 miles up the Pacific coast, roughly the length of a dozen Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons lying end to end. When it rumbles, we’ll need all 12 of him to spring into action — although, as Brad Peyton’s San Andreas warns, that still won’t be enough to save the day.

As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what these women mean.

Here’s the ingredients of most of today’s lefty issues docs: doom, doom, Koch brothers, Monsanto, doom, doom, CNN clips, doom, doom, upbeat guitars and the promise that everything can change if we just get involved. Andrew Morgan’s The True Cost leaves the Koches out of its rundown of the damage…