If there are two things Florida is well known for, it’s hurricanes and alligators. Yesterday morning, we were blessed with the trailer for a film that gives us both: Crawl. Produced by Sam Raimi (Drag Me To Hell, Spider-Man, Evil Dead) and directed by Alexandre Aja (High Tension, Piranha), Crawl might…
Wild Nights With Emily. Biopics typically choose to maintain the popular image of their subject, one that’s typically a toned down version of reality. Madeleine Olnek’s Wild Nights With Emily, on the other hand, upends traditional ideas of Emily Dickinson for its audiences. Where there was once misery, there is…
Australian actor Jason Clarke can’t get over how much art has influenced life in Miami. “It’s exactly like Michael Mann’s Miami Vice. I’ve seen so many [Ferrari] Testarossas so far, I’m out of my mind,” he declares. Tampa-born actress Amy Seimetz, a filmmaker known to Miami audiences for her work…
Bad boys, bad boys — whatcha gonna do when they come for you, Miami? Bad Boys for Life, the third installment of the buddy-cop movies that helped turn Will Smith and Martin Lawrence into A-list movie stars, will be filming in Miami this month. Under the production name “Garden Films Productions…
When was the last time you visited a library? Oftentimes, we forget what a community staple our local library is, and all that it offers its patrons. In Emilio Estevez’s latest film, The Public, the filmmaker focuses his lens on the lives of librarians. Opening in select cinemas…
Miami’s most famous abuela is lending her voice to a new Cartoon Network animated series. You already know Jenny Lorenzo as her Abuela character on YouTube and the media site Mitú. Now, the Cuban-American and Miami native has nabbed a recurring role in the upcoming show Victor & Valentino. Premiering on…
Florida fuckery is Rakontur’s bread and butter. As pointed out early on in Screwball, the latest documentary by Miami-based filmmakers Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman, WTFlorida lore dates back to the 16th Century, when Ponce de León came here seeking the Fountain of Youth. The filmmakers make an important connection…
Us. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching Jordan Peele’s Us unfold. It’s a film that wears its influences on its sleeve — everything from Alfred Hitchcock to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a bit of an oddball leaning a la Richard Kelly, albeit in a more palatable, less thematically ambitious fashion…
Latinos in Hollywood know that to truly make a difference in the industry, the change must take place behind the camera as well as in front of it. Producer Maylen Calienes, a Miamian who was born in Cuba and raised in Florida, began her career as an actor but quickly realized she could do more in a different role.
O Cinema Wynwood is now officially closed. All traces of the arthouse, along with its culinary experiment next door, the Wynwood Yard, will likely be bulldozed by the end of the year to make way for a mixed-use building of apartments and shops. But life persisted for…
Five Feet Apart. Noses blowing and heavy sobs will be heard around the world when Five Feet Apart releases this week, another entry into the odd little subgenre that is Romance Featuring One Or More Terminally Ill Characters (whose most popular film is undoubtedly The Fault in Our Stars). At…
Everybody Knows. Two-time Oscar-winning Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi is a filmmaker who has crafted subtle but focused movies about the dynamics of human relations in Iran. Here, he goes out on a limb with a cast of Spanish actors as varied as that of Cannonball Run — and falls off…
The Miami Film Festival’s opening night documentary, “This Changes Everything,” is a bold call for gender equality in the film industry. It cites devastating statistics that measure women’s participation in some roles as low as 2 percent, and includes testimony from directors, producers, television network executives, and women actors from…
Greta. Neil Jordan’s “Greta” is the best kind of B-movie: a knowingly funny thriller that allows the actress at its core to go ham. Isabelle Huppert, arguably the greatest living actress, plays the titular Greta Hideg, a woman who leaves bags on the trains in New York hoping for someone…
This Changes Everything. This year, Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival takes a big risk with its opening night film. Generally a place for celebratory, uplifting cinema, the first movie to screen at the festival’s centerpiece venue, the storied Olympia Theater, is a documentary that wags its finger at the…
As millions of young people across the country became transfixed by Elvis Presley’s hip shaking, a subculture of young, Jewish, New York-to-Miami Beach transplants looked past the blues and country-tinged sounds coming out of the American South, leaning instead toward the tropical beat of pre-revolution Cuba. This is the story pf the Mamboniks.
Unlike this year’s live-action Oscar shorts, which mostly centered on white boyhood, the Miami Film Festival’s shorts lineup has upped its own ante by bringing a host of diverse voices to the screen for its 36th annual event. The fest lineup balances established talents like Patricia Clarkson with rising local filmmakers.
Miami-based documentary filmmaker Billy Corben speaks in the same style his movies unfold: fast and peppered with plenty of self-effacing jokes. You don’t want to laugh for fear of missing what he might say next. On a tight schedule to finish one of the two films he’s slated to premiere…
Last night’s Green Book’s Best Picture win spoiled the 2019 Academy Awards for many viewers. But before that film, which has been widely criticized for its “white savior” story line, took home the night’s biggest prize, the Oscars seemed to be making improvements in acknowledging both diverse nominees and fan favorites.
On Wednesday afternoon, “One Day at a Time” showrunner Gloria Calderon Kellett tweeted that she had just left a meeting with Netflix and had learned some troubling news about her original series: it was once again in danger of being canceled. Why? Low viewership. Kellett’s full tweet read: “NEWS: Met…
Arctic. The feature film debut by writer-director Joe Penna is a rather grim and grueling survivalist action movie peppered by a handful of startling OMG moments. Underneath all that, however, lies powerful subtext about how purpose adds meaning to life. Arctic follows Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen), the only survivor of a…
Get red carpet ready and head to one of these five South Florida spots on Sunday, February 24, to watch the Oscars with fellow cinephiles.
