Director Rodney Ascher has made a career of exploring fascinating concepts via documentaries. His first feature, Room 237, was all about a variety of interpretations that obsessed fans found in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The second, The Nightmare, was more horror based, interviewing people who suffer sleep paralysis and…
Blood in the streets, animals running loose, people being stabbed in the back — it’s just another day in Miami, at least during Popcorn Frights. Now in its third year, the film festival devoted to horror in all its forms is bigger than ever. Spanning a full week, with anywhere…
What will become of Zion? No, not the loosely defined term for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, but a mild-mannered and fundamentally righteous shopkeeper living in Jerusalem and pulled between conservative religious forces and modernity. (Oh, so maybe I do mean the Jewish homeland in the Middle East.)…
The dictates of Hollywood screenwriting can’t quite constrain the wildness of Jeannette Walls’ family and her best-selling memoir. Despite a tidy resolution, too many scenes whose shapes are immediately familiar from other movies, and an absurd climax that dramatizes the conflict between a daughter and her father through the wheezy…
In the 1980s, four-quadrant studio comedies (i.e. for the whole family) peddled in relentlessly dark premises that directors then brightened up with wholesomeness: Three Men and a Baby features an orphaned infant who is mistakenly given away to drug dealers; Ghostbusters boasts multiple fatalities at the hands of an accountant…
Here’s a great joke. An unhappy married couple get the chance to view, through the goggles of a dimension-hopping mad scientist, how their lives have played out in an alternate reality. The husband, an insecure drip, goes first. Turns out in a world only slightly different from this one he’s…
Yes, you’ve heard it’s bad. It is. But there are some things to like in The Dark Tower, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel series. Just as in the books, an evil sorcerer named The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) orders around his henchpeople…
A new Miami Vice TV series is in the works, but what does it mean for the Magic City?
Give Putin this: The man knows how to deny his government’s elaborate, outrageous conspiracies violating international laws and norms. To this day, despite the 37 medals that have been stripped from his nation’s Olympians, Putin insists that Russia never engaged in a longrunning campaign of doping its athletes and then…
Man, it’s a hot one. This summer is a miserable mixture of extreme heat and rain. Instead of suffering outside, keep dry and cool inside one of your local art cinemas. With the continuing growth of the repertory cinema scene in Miami, there are a ton of options for classic films to improve your cinematic literacy while also providing a good time.
Only slowly does it become clear that Comrade Detective, a star-driven meta-prank cop-show curio, isn’t supposed to suck. This fact hit me early in the second episode, a full hour into this squirmiest of prestige streaming series, when the comedy’s winking premise — that we’re watching a well-regarded but propagandistic…
I sincerely hope that there’s a five-hour cut of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit somewhere, a version with cleaner through-lines, deeper characterizations and a more organic narrative. But the version that we have right now — a messy, troubling beast clocking in at around 150 minutes — is riveting in its own…
It’s August, which means it’s even hotter than July and you need TV now more than ever! The planet is hot, but you watching TV in your underwear with a fan pointed directly at your swimsuit parts is even hotter! Have at it! Manhunt: Unabomber, Aug. 1 (Discovery) Essentially, this…
It’s hard to imagine a less promising film title than An Inconvenient Sequel. Maybe Another Imposition Upon Your Time? It’s clear, in the opening minutes, as we watch him shake off the slights and smears of his critics, that Al Gore is too savvily upbeat a technocrat to give the…
At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…
Earlier this year, the film Moonlight won critics’ hearts. The story, adapted from a Tarell Alvin McCraney play by his fellow Liberty City-raised director Barry Jenkins, proved to the world that Miami is fertile ground for filmmakers. Now, Quiet on the Set! hopes to educate Miami’s next Barry Jenkins…
Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…
It’s always a bit troubling when a theme of the past becomes fashionable again, decades after its inception, in a way that’s completely unrelated to nostalgia. In 2004, it was the crimped hair and fishnets of the ’80s, the same way that chokers and flannel from the ’90s are cute now. The reasons behind these recurring trends are unclear; they just seem to pop up, like an unavoidable cycle of resurfacing imagery that only some can recognize as vaguely familiar.
Here’s how a fan magazine might profile the hero of The Last Tycoon (Amazon), played by Matt Bomer. His name belongs in marquees, but he deserves a place somewhere higher. Monroe Stahr toils as an angel on Earth, making dreams come true every day as a producer at Brady-American Pictures…
Sometimes critics and filmmakers agree. We suggested, in our 2015 review of People Places Things, that writer-director James Strouse should please give more screen time to supporting actor Jessica Williams. Now, in his new rom-com for Netflix, The Incredible Jessica James, he turns the camera directly at the former Daily…
“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the…
“You know when you’re kind of hungover and tired and you don’t know what to do Sunday morning? You put Landline on,” director Gillian Robespierre jokes. “That’s the goal with all the things I try to create.”
