Graduation Lays Bare the Cost of Thriving in a Corrupt Society

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is one of the best films I’ve ever seen about corruption. That’s true despite the fact that Mungiu underplays the typical elements found in tales about this subject: You won’t find many fast-talking crooks, sinister cops or elaborate sting operations here. Or a looming sense…

Faena Art’s Biennale of Moving Images Brings Global Culture to Miami Beach

Clad in his trademark all-white garb, with a matching bandanna and Panama hat, Alan Faena is the namesake of the city’s most upscale hotel, Faena Hotel Miami Beach. With his wife and close collaborator Ximena Caminos, he launched the Faena District to house the North American operations of Faena Art during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2016.

Four Must-See Movies at the 2017 MiFo LGBT Film Festival

The latest edition of the MiFo LGBT Film Festival will screen a variety of queer films April 21 through 30. For ten days, you can catch movies that offer something different from the straight white nonsense you endure daily. But given dozens of films, which should you prioritize? We’re here to help.

Nacho Vigalondo on Balancing Human Life and Kaiju Rampages in Colossal

Over four features and countless shorts, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo has cemented his status as a director who mixes genre elements with surprisingly personal stories and playful narrative trickery. His mind-bending first feature Timecrimes (2007) starts off as a horror movie, then turns into a time-travel tale and finally the…

Colossal Has a Big Idea, but It Quickly Shrinks

Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…

Like a Stunned America, Selina Meyer Searches for a Path Forward

HBO’s acid-bathed Beltway satire Veep didn’t exactly predict our absurd political reality. But it did come close enough that revisiting past seasons is like watching footage of a train wreck run backwards in slow motion. The episode called “C**tgate” brought a vaginal euphemism into a presidential election. “Election Night” saw…

MST3K‘s Return Is Good Enough That You Should Really Just Relax

First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…