Sometimes failure leads to success. With the short film Scenes From Our Young Marriage, filmmaker Ronald Baez learned that lesson. What began as a feature production became a lengthy journey to create a short film that would screen at Borscht’s West Kendall International Film Festival and the Miami Film Festival this year.
Pop quiz. What comic-book adaptation centers on a white man orphaned by tragedy but blessed with great wealth who travels to an Asian country, only to return to America as a fearsome hero of amazing skill? That’s a trick question, of course: There are too many to count. In Batman…
It’s been awhile since New Times talked to Tatu Baby, AKA Katherine Flores, Miami’s bombshell tattoo artist and popular two-time contestant on Spike TV’s Ink Master in 2012 and 2013. This year, she’s back on TV, hanging out with Ceaser from VH1’s Black Ink Crew. Rumor has it sparks flew between Tatu Baby and…
With movie-history viewing choices spawning like mold in a damp room, we can easily see the things we didn’t even know we’d never seen. For me that includes Takashi Miike’s Black Society Trilogy (Arrow Video), a trio of quick, down-and-dirty crime-gang pulp rockets (1995-99) that established Miike as Japan’s fin-de-siècle…
In recent months, there have been serious calls for liberal city dwellers to reach beyond their “bubble” to better understand their rural counterparts. What’s rarely brought into the conversation: that large swathes of the so-called liberal elite have roots in rural places. These people, myself included, came of age among…
“Do not wait for permission,” film critic Rebecca Theodore-Vachon urged at this weekend’s Miami Film Festival. The Google Seminar Series on Gender & Racial Gaps in Film & Tech, which featured festival programmer Kiva Reardon moderating conversations with five women in the industry, emphasized that advice.
José María Cabral is a 28-year-old Dominican film director whose fifth movie, Carpinteros (Woodpeckers), will be screened at the Miami Film Festival this Friday, March 10. The feature, set in the Dominican Republic’s infamous Najayo prison, tells the story of two lovers forced by distance and incarceration to use sign language to communicate.
Gentle, humane, embracing a full range from slapstick to tragedy, Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy about the people of the Marseille waterfront has bewitched audiences for decades. Multiple remakes, including a Broadway musical, Hollywood condensations by James Whale in 1938 and Joshua Logan in 1961 and a recent “reboot” from French actor…
Let’s say you had to make up a list of historical moments that might serve as grand backdrops for sweeping, old-fashioned, Hollywood-style romantic dramas. How high would you rank the Armenian Genocide? How high would you rank any genocide? Watching Hotel Rwanda, you probably never hoped that, amid the carnage,…
“It’s been two years since we’ve released anything,” director Billy Corben says of himself and Rakontur producing partner Alfred Spellman. After a brief pause, he laughs and rhetorically asks, “It’s like, what the fuck do these guys do for a living?” Corben is reluctant to share what exactly he’s been…
Sometimes the mezzobrow film-culture deadlands of the 1980s looked like it was populated almost entirely by opal-eyed European children, spying on hayloft sex and weathering the neglect of peasant elders. That tame moment found its homogenizable directors, particularly Scandinavian teddy bears, imported to Hollywood. Such was the fate of Bille…
Not a soul in the world who has seen one of Rossy de Palma’s performances will be surprised to know that every ounce of energy and charisma the Spanish actress brings to her work is a part of her natural being. That fact was proven beautifully at Miami Film Festival’s riveting Saturday-night event, An Evening With Rossy de Palma.
With Borscht Diez having just ended and Miami Film Festival in full swing, Miami audiences have enjoyed a full roster of new films to check out. But what about the classics? March offers many.
The movies never get the Midwest right. When, onscreen, have you seen white people at the grocery store mouth that shy, apologetic “oop” noise every time someone walks close enough that they feel they must shift out of the way? Or a father lecturing his children about the greatness of…
For a movie in which a major character’s death is discovered when a giant lizard-monster vomits out his skull, Kong: Skull Island is a surprisingly breezy affair. It’s not so much that the characters or situations are particularly lighthearted. The film offers up plenty of wartime atmosphere and grim backstory,…
Science fiction has gotten so high and mighty on TV that it now can be easy to admire but hard to love. Westworld and Mr. Robot may win Emmys and prompt think-pieces, but their self-reflective chill keeps the audience at arm’s length — few things are as annoying as getting…
In “Women on Top,” the episode of the new Netflix docuseries Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On that screens Tuesday as part of the Miami Film Festival, two women struggle with the conventions of modern pornography from their careers behind the camera. Holly Randall, daughter of the pioneering Playboy photographer Suze Randall, fights to produce glossy, traditional porn shoots on budgets that have been slashed in the wake of free online porn. Erika Lust, faced with a dearth of erotica made with women in mind, makes her own sexy films based on real women’s fantasies.
There is probably no better place for the world premiere of Bahamian filmmaker Kareem J. Mortimer’s latest movie than the Miami Film Festival. With a cast and crew representing an array of islands in the Caribbean, Cargo focuses on an American exile with a gambling addiction in Nassau who takes a job smuggling Haitians to Florida in a desperate act to support his family.
It’s March! Time to celebrate spring by staying inside and watching more TV! National Treasure (Hulu), March 1Originally a UK Channel 4 miniseries, this is a four-hour deep-dive into rape and sexual assault allegations against a beloved celebrity comedian. Sound familiar? I have some apprehension that it’ll try too hard…
Movie actors intend no less than to live forever, a goal that seems likely for the ever-likable, endlessly surprising Bill Paxton, who died last weekend at age 61 from complications following heart surgery. (Too damn soon.) No softie, Paxton created memorable movie villains, including the loves-his-work vampire in Near Dark…
How could this not work? Table 19 boasts the right premise and a top-shelf cast: Anna Kendrick, Stephen Merchant, June Squibb, Craig Robinson and the great Lisa Kudrow as the randos consigned to a wedding reception’s least choice table, the one way in the back by the bathrooms. Mostly strangers…
You think of Richard Gere as the smooth Lothario in American Gigolo or the smooth tycoon in Pretty Woman. As the title character in Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, Gere is a lot of things, but smooth is not one of them. The movie, which will open the Miami Film Festival this Friday, stars Gere as Norman Oppenheimer, a bumbling Jewish New Yorker with a peanut allergy who is more Larry David than Edward Lewis. The movie walks the line between comedy and drama, mixing in a bit of exploration of Israeli politics. Gere took time out from speaking on behalf of the International Campaign for Tibet to talk to New Times about portraying the ambitious, eccentric Norman, who finds himself causing an international incident.
