Film, TV & Streaming

In her Netflix documentary The 13th, director Ava DuVernay traces the criminalization of blackness – enacted by a white power structure that ascribed violence and villainy to African-Americans – back to the Emancipation Proclamation. Motivated by political expediency and obvious projection, former slaveowners – with the tacit cooperation of white…

The 2Pac biopic All Eyez on Me completes an unofficial trilogy of what we could call the Bad Boy/Death Row cinematic universe. It began with 2009’s Biggie Smalls bio Notorious and continued with NWA’s Straight Outta Compton in 2015. Too bad that, like a lot of trilogies, the third movie…

The Book of Henry really wants us to believe that its 12-year-old title character (Jaeden Lieberher) is the smartest kid on Earth. Well, in many ways, he is. He’s a rational, logical thinker who knows how to play the stock market. He handles his family’s finances and works on cute,…

At least Rough Night, Lucia Aniello’s dutifully raucous new bachelorette-party comedy, achieves verisimilitude. It’s a rough watch and an evening killer, this film about friends who seem not to love, like or even really know one another. If you enjoy strained fun with people who have grown apart from you,…

Calling all Doctor Who fans: The TARDIS is about to touch down in South Florida. Florida Supercon announced yesterday that Peter Capaldi, who plays the 12th titular doctor in the long-running series, will make an appearance at this year’s convention.

It was two weeks before Salma Hayek’s 49th birthday when Mike White told her he was finally going to write that script about the dinner party, the one he’d promised her almost a year earlier. The screenplay would be loosely inspired by a real-life dinner the two had attended, but…

For Jeff Friday, the Oscar-winning success of Moonlight, a film shot in Miami by a black director and starring an all-black cast, hardly means anything has changed for African-Americans in the movie business. “I don’t really see Moonlight’s success as being an indication of Hollywood’s appetite for black cinema, because…

Lucia Aniello’s ensemble comedy Rough Night might look, from its marketing, like a gender-flipped Very Bad Things. Both comedies feature a pre-wedding party that goes off the  rails when a stripper accidentally gets killed by the rowdiest member of the crew. But Aniello’s film — which stars Scarlett Johansson, Zoë…

Here’s something I never guessed I would say: It might be worth going into the new Cars movie spoiler-free. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that, at its climax, this latest installment in a springtime of sequels the world doesn’t need eases into a surprising new gear and…

A film often smartly attuned to language, Beatriz at Dinner — a sober comedy about class clash and soft-to-hard racism directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White — operates in several different idioms. English and Spanish (sometimes unsubtitled) are spoken, as are the lexicons of healing and affluence…

The horror! The horror! It’s back! And it’s pulling Miami into the depths of terror. The Popcorn Frights Film Festival, taking place August 11 to 17 at O Cinema Wynwood, has announced the first wave of programming for its third edition.

Last year, Cuban-born Miami resident Yusnier Viera represented the 305 on Fox’s Superhuman, a contest show that lets ordinary people with extraordinary skills test their abilities against one another for the chance to win a massive cash prize. This year, Miami resident Nelson Dellis will take the Superhuman stage to compete against a new crop of supertalented contestants. There must be something in the South Florida water.

What makes Floridians so perfect for reality TV? Out of the initial 31 suitors vying to win over Rachel Lindsay’s heart on the current season of The Bachelorette, a lucky number seven have connections to the Sunshine State. And they’re not all whackjobs, either. All of them made it past…

Since last November, we’ve been asked to understand, if not necessarily sympathize with, the furious resentments of the racists, misogynists, homophobes and plutocrats who have brought us to this point of political calamity. The fifth season of Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) appears to be its own kind of…

Over the years, Tom Cruise has been many things, but he’s almost never been marginalized — not in one of his own movies. Oh, he’s played supporting parts and done cameos here and there, but even in those smaller roles (in films like Tropic Thunder or Rock of Ages), he…

Alexander Sorondo likes movies. A lot. Probably more than you like almost anything in your life, at least anything that isn’t related to you by blood. The 25-year-old Miami native loves movies so much that he has taken on the challenge of watching, and writing an essay about, every movie that appears in the 2012 edition of Steven Jay Schneider’s 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. He calls it the “Thousand Movie Project,” and he’s inviting you to join him.

Megan Leavey is a war picture, but the scenes of combat, while suitably tense, are not its selling point. Instead, the film, based on a true story, follows aimless young Leavey (Kate Mara), who in 2003 leaves home to become a Marine. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite condenses the scenes of boot…

The trailer for Henry Koster’s 1952 adaptation of My Cousin Rachel channels hysteria as the voiceover asks, “Was she woman or witch? Madonna or murderess?” Unfortunately, the film itself proved far tamer than the marketing suggested. The novel’s author, Daphne du Maurier, who also penned The Birds and the psychological…

The 2017 Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Sunday with a slate of generally predictable (and perfectly worthwhile) awards. And while it may have been a somewhat lackluster year for the festival’s main competition, there were plenty of cinematic treasures to be found on the Croisette – even a couple…

A red door is, biblically speaking, a sign of protection, an echo of the blood rubbed on posts and lintels during Passover to keep God from smiting you and your home. But like most things that the Bible insists are positive, the red door also comes with an undercurrent of…