Outside of dudes killing dudes, there’s little the moviegoers seem to love more than weddings, a truth that Elite Zexer’s heartsick desert drama Sand Storm exploits for a first-act sucker punch. The nuptials that teen Layla (Lamis Ammar) is driving her father Suliman (Hitham Omari) toward, the frame of a…
Season three of Amazon’s Transparent has few of the cratering events that have marked our time with the Pfeffermans up to this point, but it continues to reward thinking viewers as it considers issues of gender and identity, the intersection of theory and reality, the lingering impact of sexual abuse…
“Shit’s getting ugly in the RuPaul Drag Race.” —Janae, Orange Is the New Black RuPaul’s All Stars 2 has been perhaps the greatest season of the only reality-TV competition that matters. Logo TV’s Emmy-winning series is not only a mainstream ingress into a historically devalued, antinormative art form for an…
If it seems like there’s a lot to be excited about within Miami Film Festival’s 13-film lineup for its Gems series, it’s because there is. The October installment of the festival, taking place between October 13 and 16, is meant to just give a taste of what’s to come for…
It was only a few years ago that filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall was living in Miami and working on her short film, Si Nos Dejan, commissioned by Borscht Corp. Now, she’s coming back to the city as part of the Borscht 9.5 mini-festival with her debut feature film, Ma, for a…
There’s plenty of time to wonder, as J.K. Simmons narrates page after page of backstory, whether the creators of The Accountant realized that their dutifully twisty R-rated thriller was actually another superhero story. Yes, it’s got trappings of psychology and adult thoughtfulness, speeches about the mysteries of the brain and…
The month before Fish Tank writer/director Andrea Arnold premiered her film American Honey at this year’s edition of the Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Jury Prize), she spoke before an audience with director Ira Sachs as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. The following are excerpts of her remarks, edited for clarity…
This is the one where a guy eats his own puke. The one where Divine stabs a boyfriend to death, gorges on his innards, then makes out with her own bloodied image in the mirror. The one where she’s sodomized with a rosary while we see images of the crucifixion…
The techniques of verbatim theater go back decades, to at least the 1950s, when young German theater troupes would reenact complicated court cases word for word onstage. Even earlier, in the United States, the WPA paid for a form of this performance with its Living Newspapers, in which theater artists…
In American Honey, her 162-minute fourth feature (and the first she’s made in the U.S.), the British director Andrea Arnold sets an infatuation-at-first-sight encounter to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a conversation about dreams to Bruce Springsteen singing “Dream Baby Dream” and a moment of camaraderie among itinerant youngsters traveling across…
Here’s what matters most: You will laugh. Kevin Hart on a stage before thousands, yapping for more than an hour? I don’t care what kind of miserable killjoy you are, you’re going to laugh. There are two reasons you might be offended — you may find the material either too…
Christopher Guest’s films mostly deal with passionate but ordinary people who aspire to positions of status within strange little subcultures: mid-century folk music, dog shows, community theater or, in the case of his new mockumentary, Mascots, the world of sports-mascot competitions. In the alternate universe of Guest’s first film in…
So much for your weekend plans. Miami filmmaking collective Borscht Corp. has announced the dates of its next film festival — and it starts Wednesday. The “mini film fest,” as Borscht’s announcement describes it, runs through Saturday with a series of screenings and afterparties by some of Miami’s best-known filmmakers:…
“As it always happens in the Chris Guest movies, we really don’t talk to each other before we get to set,” Jane Lynch says, explaining how she creates her menagerie of characters, specifically Gabby Monkhouse from Guest’s newest mockumentary, Mascots. “A couple months before, I got a call from Chris,…
As has been widely noted, Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes isn’t really a television series; its six episodes are not particularly self-contained, and plot developments crest and climax willy-nilly regardless of where each segment ends. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour movie, the longest one Allen’s ever made, and with the option…
Fred Armisen and Bill Hader are a rarity in the comedy world: funny people with hearts of gold. It was obvious all those years when they were cast members on Saturday Night Live. They handled their characters — whether living, dead or purely fictional — with a visible sweetness. Think…
OCTOBER “Narciso Rodriguez: An Exercise in Minimalism” October 9 through January 8, 2017, at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, FIU, 10975 SW 17th St., Miami; 305-348-2890; thefrost.fiu.edu. From creating Michelle Obama’s 2008 election-night victory duds to conquering the runway with his signature style, Cuban-American fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez…
South Florida has no shortage of film festivals: Borscht, Filmgate, Brazilian, Key West, American Black, Miami Jewish, Miami Short, Popcorn Frights, and others. But the most prestigious of them all are the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival and the Miami Film Festival, which together bring hundreds of new films to…
It takes all of two minutes of listening to Emily Blunt’s voiceover in The Girl on the Train before you have to wonder whether this narrator might be unreliable. As her Rachel rides Metro-North in and out of Manhattan, detailing her growing obsession with the ostensibly perfect couple she steals…
Forgiveness is tricky and personal, and you can’t be blamed for not offering it. Buying a ticket to Nate Parker’s slave-revolt drama The Birth of a Nation demands at least some measure of it. As you’ve probably heard, while a student at Penn State, Parker — the film’s star, director…
When Relativity Media — the production company/distributor behind Masterminds, the newest vehicle for Zach Galifianakis to do his painfully committed schtick — started getting press, co-founder/co-CEO Ryan Kavanaugh boasted of his secret sauce for success. A proprietary risk-evaluation algorithm that crunched variables like cast, release date, relative examples in the…
With October arriving and the smell of pumpkin in the air, it’s the season for freaky midnight movies full of ghosts and gore. But it’s also just another month in Miami, where there are always plenty of classic films to go around. Spooky or not, these screenings are sure to…
