Miami Film Festival’s GEMS Announces 2017 Lineup

If it’s been too long since you’ve had a dose of the Miami Film Festival, there’s good news: GEMS is returning to satiate your filmgoing desires. Now in its third year, the 2017 edition of the fest will take place October 12 through 15 at Miami Dade College’s Tower Theater. And the full lineup has plenty to get you excited.

The Giddily Nasty Kingsman Franchise Plays It Safe in the Sequel

The sequel to 2015’s hit Kingsman: The Secret Service won’t make you feel the urgent need to take a shower and/or throw up, like the original probably did. Believe it or not, that’s not always a good thing. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to his brutal, joyfully degenerate…

The Lost Souls in Kogonada’s Columbus Find Glory in Indiana’s Architecture

In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t. (Kogonada, by…

A Boy’s Double Life Threatens to Blow Up in Beach Rats

In Eliza Hittman’s debut feature, It Felt Like Love, a young girl tests the waters of adult sexuality, offering her body up to the statuesque bros who live in her Eastern Seaboard beach town. She tries her hardest to mimic the women in pornos, the ones all the boys want,…

Crown Heights Tells a Compelling True Story with Jarring Impatience

In adapting for the screen the long, hard story of Colin Warner — a Trinidadian native who, as a Brooklyn teenager in 1980, was wrongfully convicted of murder and sent to prison for more than 20 years — Matt Ruskin’s Crown Heights moves along in a counterproductive hurry. Scenes rich…

Resisting Trump With The Sound of Music

November 2016 wasn’t the best time to have a baby. My water broke two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president. The world suddenly felt unstable — and my political worries were compounded by the wails of an alert newborn for whom sleep was not on the agenda.