The Boss Baby might look, at first, like any other major studio animation release. Directed by DreamWorks vet Tom McGrath (Madagascar, Megamind), the movie hits all the expected notes: the enduring importance of family, the persistence of untrustworthy/clueless adults, and the inherent hilarity of shoehorning David Mamet dialogue into a…
No director in America is hotter today than Miami’s own Barry Jenkins, fresh off his film Moonlight’s three Oscar wins, including Best Picture. No author had a bigger 2016 than Colson Whitehead, whose The Underground Railroad won a National Book Award and a favored spot on President Obama’s reading list.
Niki Caro has the rare ability to elevate what could be emotionally manipulative schlock to earnest art. To judge by the trailer, her low-budget breakthrough feature Whale Rider (2003) seemed a straightforward children’s drama about a girl overcoming the odds — tame, commercial Disney fare. But the film itself proved…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
CHIPS is the latest kitschy-yet-beloved cop show to get remodeled on the big screen as a bromantic buddy comedy. However, unlike the way the movie versions of Starsky & Hutch and 21 Jump Street played up those shows’ alleged homoeroticism for ironic, lighthearted laughs, CHIPS lets it be known from…
The marriage between HBO and Dwayne Johnson takes the next step Monday when Rock and a Hard Place, a documentary Johnson produced, airs on the channel. The documentary follows incarcerated juveniles looking to cash in on a second chance as they attempt to conquer and complete the Miami-Dade County Corrections & Rehabilitation Boot Camp…
Just last month, the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival had a ball at the University of Miami, where the fest hosted a series of film screenings, workshops, and virtual-reality and mixed-reality experiences. Now that the latest edition of the festival is in the rear-view mirror, what have the FilmGate Miami folks…
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters airs March 26, PBS Some of us can never have too much of the Brontës. But I understand if your response to another dose of costume drama on the moors is “Shoot me now.” Reader, be strong! If you were dead, you’d be deprived…
Dr. Michael Salzhauer, one of the most famous and successful plastic surgeons in Miami, is also one of the camera-friendliest. He’s built his business in large part through viral videos and social media stunts. Now he’s taking the next logical step: starring in his own reality TV show. This Friday,…
The antagonistic atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair relished it when Life magazine called her “The Most Hated Woman in America” in the 1964 profile that only heightened her notoriety. That designation followed the 1963 Supreme Court ruling on Murray v. Curlett (and another lawsuit) that ended Bible-reading in public schools. Director…
Gina Prince-Bythewood has directed two of the most devastatingly romantic films of this millennium — Love & Basketball (2000) and Beyond the Lights (2014) — so it might seem odd at first to see her at the helm of a TV show about police violence, unsolved murders, and race relations…
The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and…
Shirley MacLaine has been described by press and co-stars over the years as “rude,” “nasty,” “difficult” and “selfish.” Hell, she’s called herself impatient, caustic and much worse. None of that has stopped her from being a fiery mainstay in American screwball comedies and dramas. Her signature pixie cut came to…
Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The…
In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to…
To understand how Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending might disappoint you if you’ve read the suspenseful, tear-jerking Julian Barnes novel on which it’s based, you should think back to Batra’s much-lauded debut feature The Lunchbox (2013). In that humanistic film, a young woman trapped in her marriage falls…
“There’s been a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won.” Those eight words uttered by La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz sent the internet — and much of the media-consuming world — into a tizzy. A nation watched in disbelief as the Moonlight team cautiously took the stage at the Academy Awards. But Patrick Decile, the 20-year-old Miami native who played Terrel, the film’s brutal antagonist, was not among them.
Somehow, MTV2, the channel that was launched 21 years ago to show all the music videos MTV wasn’t, has essentially turned into BET — or TV One or Centric or whatever black programming-filled channel you know about. The evidence is all there — before it jumped back to its original…
There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it – and you’re usually faced with something simple,…
The Miami Film Festival event Straight Out of Miami: Rakontur Previews New Work, which took place at Regal South Beach, began with the most pressing question of the night. Festival documentary programmer Thom Powers asked Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman: “What the fuck have you been doing?”
Consider, before you consider anything else about the sequel to Trainspotting, that the director of both films is an artist whose signal trait had been a seeming repulsion at the thought of ever going back to the well. Between the original and the new T2 (cheeky title, innit), Danny Boyle…
It’s the take as old as time. Yes, Beauty and the Beast’s love story can be read as a tale of abuse and brainwashing, of a woman imprisoned by a tyrant until she starts chatting with the table settings — and then, as seasons pass, chastising herself in song for…
