In the current noble vogue of admirable female figures in documentaries, now comes Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us, the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history —…
It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays here in Miami, inside and out. Although it is still not particularly cold weather-wise, hopefully the theaters will crank the air to 30 and whip up a snowstorm during a film. December is here and so are a bundle of classic…
Yes, Janis Joplin made a hell of a record out of Rodgers & Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” but you’re right if you winced to learn that Amy Berg’s new documentary feature about Joplin, Little Girl Blue, takes that song as its title — and as its dismal argument and organizing…
Oh, Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come unfreighted from expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…
Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…
There are movies that aren’t for everyone, and then there are movies that ought to be stamped with a “Caution: Not for Everyone” disclaimer. Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is not only about rich teenagers — a common one-note villain in most American comedies. It’s also about old-money Manhattan teenagers…
The Nazis lost World War II, but they’ve conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
Although the history of the Cuban Revolution is a subject rarely found in schoolbooks, it’s a subject very familiar to the people of Miami. In one way or another, we’ve heard the stories of how a young Fidel Castro rose to power by overthrowing the unwanted Fulgencio Batista and most…
Theeb, a foreign-language film from Jordan, made its South Florida debut during Miami Dade College’s 32nd-annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) earlier this year. During the festival, the film took the screenwriting prize and left audiences — and critics — in awe. Told from the perspective of the nomadic eyes…
Films festivals are often a dime a dozen, with some cities pretty much boasting a fest for every subgenre and topic imaginable. But some aspire to a higher purpose, namely education, and Mountainfilm is one of those. Mountainfilm in Telluride is a 37 year old documentary film festival in Colorado,…
With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games began in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…
How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…
It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense they were wounded,…
We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…
Movies are great. But what makes enjoying movies extra special is when you’re able to lounge, have some food (in addition to just popcorn), and utterly forget the world around you. Sometimes, such a feeling is hard to accomplish in a movie theater, which is why so many people these…
If you live in Miami, there’s no doubt that you’ve noticed the effect of the Castro regime from just 90 miles away. Going on more than 50 years in power, the Castro dictatorship weighs particularly heavy on the generation that remembers the revolution as it happened. Return to Ithaca, a movie…
