When New Times asked Laura Gasperini, Valentina Vincenzini, and Isabella Roberto – the three women behind the Miami Independent Film Festival – what the most rewarding part of running a film festival is, an uncomfortable silence fell over the table. They stared uncertainly at each other for a moment. “We…
The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…
Most hero stories dating back to Achilles are fantasies of power, of the world made right through violence. What sets Spider-Man apart, outside his joyous bouncing through New York City, is that his stories are also fantasies of responsibility. Rather than just kick bad-guy ass, Spider-Man must forever fight to…
Stepping outside for more than 30 seconds is pretty much the most awful thing anyone can do in Miami this season. So why not sprint from your car to the cinema to stay in the safety of A/C and catch a good film? But instead of watching the parade of mediocre summer blockbusters, catch some classic films. Here’s where to find them.
I hate July. It’s hot and there’s less TV. Nevertheless, she sweated through her bra and wrote this guide to what’s worth watching. Snowfall (FX), July 5. Justified’s Dave Andron teams up with director John Singleton for a drama about the start of the crack-cocaine epidemic in LA. Andron describes…
Who knew Cate Blanchett wanted to be Tracey Ullman? That’s probably not the reaction director Julian Rosefeldt hopes will be stirred by this rigorous series of monologues, stitched together from more than 50 artistic and political manifestos and performed by Blanchett as 13 characters. But, like Ullman, Blanchett takes the…
Hollywood has many more outstanding actors than it does outstanding scripts. That’s the only way to explain Naomi Watts’ career, which launched stateside with a masterful twin performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Even with a pair of Oscar nominations, though, the actress has spent years languishing in Nondescript Mom…
In the run-up to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Then, after people had seen it, Okja turned out to be … one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Now that it’s…
Popcorn Frights has promised to be “bigger, bolder, and bloodier” in its third year, and the second wave of program announcements reflects that commitment. The festival has already revealed its homegrown horror section and a number of other new features. Now it says more than 40 film premieres from eight countries will hit Miami this August 11 through 17.
Ever since her feature debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), a dreamy, diaphanous tale about the mysteries of girlhood, Sofia Coppola has ranked among the finest distillers of mood (especially languor) and milieu. Those qualities abound in The Beguiled, her sixth film, an adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s Civil War–set novel of…
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd,…
In the opening scene of Transformers: The Last Knight, we are presented with the spectacle of King Arthur and his knights locked in an existential battle for the survival of human civilization, even though we’re not really told who they’re fighting or why. No matter, because this after all is…
The world might feel like a schizophrenic hellscape where everyday you find yourself asking “Is this real life?” At least there is some comfort in knowing we still have RuPaul’s Drag Race. The Emmy award-winning drag queen reality competition jumped from boutique LGBTQ Viacom channel Logo TV to VH1 this…
The Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science’s latest event touches upon one of the most important films of the year: Wonder Woman.
In Soviet Russia, a group of artists found a way to counter government lies.
Ana Lily Amirpour’s comic post-apocalyptic action-drama offers little explanation of what exactly its “bad batch” is, or how the members of its motley, unfortunate tribe of humans wound up banished to a desert wasteland. Instead, Amirpour lets her camera linger on a sign warning that everything beyond a 10-foot-high metal…
Everything you know about Tupac is likely wrong. Casual fans think of him as a loyal left coast soldier in hip-hop’s East Coast/West Coast war, but he actually had tremendous love and admiration for New York, where he was born and largely raised. Others cite his 1994 Manhattan shooting as…
Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense. These tense moments arise not from any plot machinations but from the anticipation of the next exquisitely calibrated response by Emmanuelle Devos, the film’s star, who appears in every…
In Kirill Serebrennikov’s tightly wound symbolic drama, a Russian high schooler starts spouting off biblical verses at the teachers, administrators and teens around him, decrying the hypocrisy of their ways and of a fallen world. You can feel the allegory coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t mean you…
The stars of one of the best-reviewed shows on TV landed in Miami for the American Black Film Festival this past weekend. Insecure, created by Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl’s star Issa Rae and former “senior black correspondent” on The Daily Show Larry Wilmore, was an instant hit when it debuted in 2016.
It’s only after three encounters, a night on molly, a blow-up argument, an impassioned recitation of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig,” and some tender May-December — late December — sex that Sam Elliott’s The Hero character can be bothered to ask what Laura Prepon’s does for a living. Turns…
In her Netflix documentary The 13th, director Ava DuVernay traces the criminalization of blackness – enacted by a white power structure that ascribed violence and villainy to African-Americans – back to the Emancipation Proclamation. Motivated by political expediency and obvious projection, former slaveowners – with the tacit cooperation of white…
