The most destructive villain in this year’s summer movies isn’t some super-powered fiend. It’s us, the consumers of North America, whose desires shape the world. The U.S. looms over Jayro Bustamante’s patient, observant, exquisitely painful debut feature Ixcanul, just as it looms over the Guatemalan coffee plantation in which Bustamante’s…
Eight minutes into the pilot episode of Cinemax’s new crime show Quarry — an uneven but largely rewarding translation of Max Allan Collins’ crime books into emotionally challenging, character-driven television — Marine Lloyd “Mac” Conway, Jr. (Logan Marshall-Green) returns home a day early from his second tour in Vietnam. By…
Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley…
Before The Eric Andre Show came along, I always thought acting like a complete lunatic on television was mostly a white-people thing. As a culture, African-Americans generally frown upon the idea of being unabashedly clownish for the masses — black folks call it “showing your ass.” All those years of…
Barbara Kopple’s Miss Sharon Jones! tells the kind of true story that makes you want to kick creation itself square in the crotch. Here’s that firecracker soul singer, nearing her 60s, her boogie still majestic, her band still a tight retro marvel, her wail still the southern end of a northbound…
In contemporary film, it’s typical for an African-American character to be the sole person of color in the story, only existing to reveal hidden racism or make white people uncomfortable with themselves. Black characters rarely get to talk to other black characters. Last year, Manohla Dargis suggested a new Bechdel-type…
Where were you when you learned that you’d be making your DJ debut at the biggest rave of the year? And that said rave was only eight hours away? Ethan, the sheepish main character of Netflix’s straight-to-streaming EDM movie XOXO, gets the news in his kitchen, where his mom is cooking breakfast…
When Pablo Escobar’s beachfront Miami mansion was torn down earlier this year, some felt it closed the books on a bloody chapter of history that tied the city to the reportedly richest drug lord ever. The tale of the infamous narco king spanned two continents, claiming the lives of thousands…
Were we wrong to root for Kevin Smith? When he burst onto the scene in 1994, it was the most improbable of rags-to-riches movie narratives: bankrolling Clerks by selling his comic book collection and running up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Almost overnight, he joined the likes of…
Aspen, Sundance, and Tribeca may be the best-known U.S. film festivals, but none of them have the commitment to South Florida exhibited by the Miami International Film Festival. The homegrown event has expanded into a year-round programmer of films designed to resonate with Miami audiences, and this October’s GEMS Film…
As the summer season comes to a close and we slip into fall, September hits us with a cool bundle of classic films that provide a variety of things to check out over the upcoming weeks. Here’s what to look forward to. Coral Gables Art Cinema Gables Cinema’s After Hours…
Ben Kingsley has spoken many words of wisdom in his lifetime, few more insightful than when he told the Observer earlier this summer that, when a male actor is directed by a woman, he “is almost given permission to be vulnerable.” In Alice Winocour’s new feature, Disorder, which lays bare…
The attempt to reconcile the personal with the political has been the great theme of Nanni Moretti’s cinema, as it was for many of the legendary Italian directors before him. In Mia Madre, it finds one of its more vivid examinations. The film’s concept is blunt — a director struggles…
Nepotism is occasionally a positive, and not just for the direct beneficiary. Ridley Scott gave us Alien, with heroine Ripley and a memorable cast of ne’er-do-wells and villains with defined personalities. And now Scott’s son, Luke, who’s been shadowing his dad on his last few big-budget films, has delivered unto…
Tension and release is the driving principle of a tearjerker, where every good fortune is countered by something worse. And as dismissive as critics often are of the genre, it’s actually quite difficult for a director to make people cry en masse and genuinely feel things. Derek Cianfrance’s foreboding melodrama…
This quietly moving doc has a hook worthy of the most shameless of Hollywood weepies, offering tragedy and a miracle and much ado about the power of movies themselves. But the film is tender and patient, as fascinated by the challenges of daily life as it is by the dramatic…
You can be forgiven for thinking that the new show from Dan Harmon, creator of Community and Rick and Morty, might come off as niche. Available on the new comedy streaming service Seeso, Harmonquest features comedians playing Pathfinder — a tabletop role-playing game similar to Dungeons and Dragons — in…
Summer may be coming to an end in other parts of the country, but not in Miami. High temperatures are holding steady, and the Magic City needs some help cooling off. Luckily, the Good Humor company is bringing the Welcome to Joyhood tour to Bayfront Park today to hand out…
Spanish writer/director Jonás Trueba admits he has a bit of baggage with Miami. The 35-year-old was only a teenager when he was last here. His father, writer/director Fernando Trueba, followed up his Oscar-winning movie Belle Epoque with what would be his first and only English-language film, Two Much. The film…
It’s hard out there for a TV comedy fan. That’s the case for network television, at least. Before All in the Family altered the TV comedy landscape, most sitcoms hewed closely to the formula of solving minor annoyances in 22 minutes (with the occasional “OMG Vincent Price in Hawaii” curveball)…
The sarcastic wag who first drawled the phrase “as exciting as watching grass grow” never intended it as a compliment. But have you ever actually watched grass grow? I mean, I haven’t either, but there must be a pretty cool hidden world of fresh-smelling earth and tickly dew and bugs…
Natalie Portman proves herself a filmmaker of intelligence, ambition and inventiveness in her debut as a director and writer — just not one who is always certain as a storyteller. A Tale of Love and Darkness adapts, with a passionate somberness, several threads from Amos Oz’s autobiographical novel of the…
