MIFFecito: Some Films Grab, Others Stumble

It’s only a few days until a taste of the annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) invades the newly renovated Tower Theater in Little Havana. The name of the minifest — MIFFecito — is a play on the cafecitos so prevalent in the neighborhood. MIFF executive director Jaie Laplante says…

The Cunning, Cutting Blue Room Leaves You Guessing

Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than bodies, time and space and human connection get most memorably diced. Working from Georges Simenon’s 1964 novel of the wrong man accused — or is he the…

Murray Plays for Laughs Until St. Vincent Gets Maudlin

The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests science…

Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children Despairs at Our Wi-Fi World

The tragedy of Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children is that it was released the year it was made. A snapshot of today’s cultural disconnection, in which Facebook, texting, World of Warcraft, and streaming smut lure people away from dinner with their families, the film’s so current that its observations…

WWII Drama Fury Grinds Your Face in the Hell of War

A gloom hangs over writer/director David Ayer’s brutal war drama Fury that only the audience can see. It’s April 1945, and we know that in weeks the Nazis will surrender. The war is already over — Hitler just hasn’t admitted it. American sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Brad Pitt) suspects as…

MIFFecito: Lake Los Angeles Builds With a Slow, Purposeful Power

With Lake Los Angeles director/writer Mike Ott presents a heart-rending but placid portrait of the often solitary pain of the undocumented immigrant. Ott effectively uses a quiet, low-key cinematic delivery that creeps up on the viewer for a simple, devastating finale that raises small gestures to noble acts of kindness…

Borscht Film Festival Announces 2014 Dates

Borscht is officially back. The film fest dedicated to South Florida talent announced Wednesday that the “allegedly ninth” edition of the event will take place December 16 through December 21 this year. Since its first run in 2003, the Borscht Film Festival has evolved from a project of New World…

What’s the Fun of a Dracula Who Hates Neck-Biting?

The Dracula Begins-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace swapping out all of that bare-neck sensuality for some videogame ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of…

The Pact 2: The Sequel Pales Before the Original

The best that can be said of The Pact 2 is that its existence might draw the attention of more viewers to The Pact, a superior indie creep-out from 2012 whose creator, the writer-director Nicholas McCarthy, fashioned it according to three inviolable principles. One: Get the heroine (Caity Lotz) into…

The Tragedy of Gary Webb Stings Even When Kill the Messenger Flags

It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…

Andre Benjamin Is Hendrix, but the Women Make Jimi

Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…