Your January TV Watch List: The Six Shows We’re Counting On

New year, new us! JK, new year, same ol’ us: watching TV and hiding in a hole from the bitter January cold and impending doom. The only solution? Watching all the television! You can take the day of the inauguration off to protest, but I expect you back under the…

Railroad Tigers Offers a Dirty Dozen–Style Caper on a Different Front

For 75 years, the U.S. has dominated the production of World War II action comedies. There’s Spielberg’s 1941 (1979), Cary Grant and Tony Curtis in Operation Petticoat (1959), and then exquisite ensembles in The Dirty Dozen (1967), Kelly’s Heroes (1970) and Inglourious Basterds (2009), among many others. We’re such experts…

Fire at Sea‘s Gianfranco Rosi on the Art of Finding What Matters

The entire time Gianfranco Rosi is talking, he’s drawing. Using a graphite pencil against an unlined notebook, the Italian documentary filmmaker instinctively makes quick sketches to illustrate his ideas and anecdotes. Counting off the number of windows on a ship, he draws three little squares. Talking about the deathly Mediterranean…

Fire at Sea Reveals Parallel Lives as the Refugee Crisis Hits Italy

There are two distinct movies in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea, and you could say that somewhere in between them lies the real one. The director, an Italian documentarian whose observational films demonstrate a formal rigor that often brings them close to experimental cinema and installation work, has trained his…

Martin Scorsese’s Priests Persevere in the Searching Silence

Martin Scorsese opens his foreword to the latest edition of Shusaku Endo’s Silence with a simple, impossible question: “How do you tell the story of Christian faith?” The director isn’t presumptuous enough to present his adaptation of that beloved novel as a definitive answer, but his film does read as…

The Dark Fable A Monster Calls Will Give Parents Nightmares

Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…

Five International TV Series That Deserve Your Couch Time

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of not-that-long-ago, foreign television was a mysterious land beyond our reach. Aside from the occasional British import, the wonders of international series were limited to those equipped with multi-region DVD players. Scandinavian gloom mostly stayed in Scandinavia. Thanks to streaming, it’s now…

The 16 Best 2016 Films Directed by Women

“Best films of 2016” lists are a dime a dozen this time of year. But even though 2016 was a disaster in many ways, it gave us plenty of great films by women. So just as we did in 2015 and 2014, New Times is running down the works that reigned above the rest. These are the 16 best films by women of the past year.

To Us, She’s Royalty: How Carrie Fisher Gave Leia Real Life

Carrie Fisher was always smarter than the words and roles written for her, smarter than what Hollywood thought it wanted out of a princess. On Christmas Eve of the all-devouring Sarlacc that is 2016, after word had spread that Fisher had suffered a heart attack, a page from her original The Empire Strikes Back script turned up on Twitter, courtesy of Will McCrabb.

New Times‘ Most-Read Film and TV Stories of 2016

As 2016 draws to a close, New Times is looking back at the year’s stories that had the most impact. Ten film and TV articles stood out from the rest, according to their high number of readers. This year, Miami readers proved to be an eclectic bunch, clicking on a weird mélange of pieces that one might not expect. So what’s on the list?

The OA Confounds and Rewards. Plus: Other Netflix Improvisations

Like craft beers or your news feed, Netflix’s niche-viewing categories are forever growing more micro-specific. Its new drama series, an eight-part bafflement called The OA, could only be categorized as a Sexually Frank Spiritual Locked-Room Suburban Afterlife Mad Scientist Communitarian Interpretive-Dance Ripped-From-the-Headlines Horror Puzzle Mystery. Its flavors never unite into…