“The end begins.” Those are the first words you see on the screen, stained with blood spatter — a la Dexter. When the harmless fly lands on Dexter’s arm and you hear a clap, Dex’s familiar morning routine fills the screen. After locking the apartment door and giving that coy…
Ever wonder what it’s like inside the mind of a serial killer? Well, without Dexter’s brilliant voice-over narration, we really wouldn’t know. But take away his story telling, and how can you get to know Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall)? One way of finding out is by looking at his…
With Friday’s release of The Heat (Sandra Bullock, Melissa McCarthy), another buddy cop movie joins a film library filled with explosions, oddball pairings and broad humor. While the genre’s been compacted into a cliche over the years (especially immediately following its heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s), and…
When Dexter’s seventh season came to an end last December, Deb was having a pretty hard time. She’d found out the truth about her serial killer brother. She struggled with feelings of love toward Dexter that weren’t so brotherly. And she was haunted by her guilt over killing Captain LaGuerta…
At 71, Twenty Feet From Stardom‘s Darlene Love Is Ready for the Big Time
White House Down Is the Best Parody Since Team America
In the Fog Is a Grinding Journey Into the Eastern Front
Because it opens with a suicide bombing in downtown Tel Aviv, and because its mystery plot involves an attempt to track down a sheik whose public expectorations call for the slaughter of Israeli civilians, The Attack is most avowedly “about” terrorism. But that’s a subject, not the subject. The film,…
Dirty Wars Documents How the U.S. Wages War Now
The Writer of Dirty Wars on the Dangers of Covert Ops
Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…
Xavier Dolan faces a seemingly insurmountable challenge from the outset of his new picture, Laurence Anyways: How to make a film about the difficulty of transitioning into a transgender life without making that subject seem reductive or abstract? One of the cinema’s ongoing problems of representation, among many others, is…
By 1975, many acts had walked through the doors of Don Davis’s Groovesville Productions offices in Detroit. None of them were quite like this, a band of three related-by-blood African-American brothers who played louder, faster, and weirder than anything anyone in the city that gave birth to Motown had ever…
Before he was one of cinema’s finest dramatists (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, Broken Embraces), writer-director Pedro Almodóvar was a provocateur and a satirist. The 63-year-old filmmaker harks back to that past with his first comedy in nearly 25 years, I’m So Excited!, a lighthearted, ensemble-driven bit…
The Heat Would Be More Likable if It Stopped Yelling Everything
With the final season of Dexter quickly approaching — it starts this Sunday! — it’s only fitting to pay tribute to the city where it all began: our vibrant Miami. Even though Dexter himself (Michael C. Hall) says in the pilot: “Miami is a great place for me, great place…
Twice, Darlene Love had to stop midverse, dropping the microphone to her side in frustration. She was coming through the speakers scratchy and thin, this only hours before she was to sing at the premiere of a documentary about her voice. “We could do five sessions in a day, and…
The Real Housewives of Miami are back, and in more ways than one. As if two seasons of the self-obsessed ladies was not enough, right? Yesterday, the ladies unleashed a media blitz on the world every bit as powerful as World War Z’s zombie takeover, with a new trailer and…
When you walk into the Miami-Dade Public Library’s film archive in downtown Miami, you encounter a unique scent. It’s bitter to the nostrils and smells somewhat like vinegar. Turns out that’s the odor of decay particular to film. Donald Chauncey, a longtime film archivist working for the library as a…
Yesterday, we told you about Rolling Stone’s dire predictions for the future of Miami — namely, that the whole place will be irreparably flooded and hurricane-wrecked by the year 2030. The filmmakers of Borscht Corp and their marine biologist collaborators at Coral Morphologic had something to say about that: “Duh,…
The Transformers Ride in 3D at Universal Studios Orlando had its grand opening yesterday, an event made all the more spectacular with explosions, a flyover, and appearances from the Transformers themselves. It was a showcase worthy of a Michael Bay movie–quite appropriate, as the ride takes after Bay’s modern Transformers…
