2017 looks like it won’t be an improvement over 2016, so here are some promising films — either reviewed or previewed — to distract you in the next three months. In keeping with the pessimism most of the country is feeling, we’re also considering “what could be bad” in the…
Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and his HBO football comedy Ballers have decided to relocate for Season 3, ditching continued production in Miami in favor of a move to California. Hollywood has promised the show a $8.3 million TV tax incentive for making the move, as well as a few other bells and whistles the Sunshine State just couldn’t match.
Pablo Larraín is having a good year. The Chilean director, Oscar-nominated a few years ago for his 2012 political drama No, has just released Jackie, featuring a striking Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. He is also about to release Neruda, a complex,…
In a profile early this year, the novelist Dana Spiotta told the New York Times, “That’s seductive, being paid attention to.” Several of the films below — those that seduced me — feature pivotal scenes, whether in diners, at picnic tables or at kitchen tables, of one character raptly listening…
I was fortunate enough this year to be at both Sundance and Cannes, so it was something like agony for me to watch the litany of critics and commentators who spent the summer and early fall complaining about the year in film — all while movies such as Manchester by…
In this, the harrowing year of 2016, I could jump into the Oscars talk. I could pick groundbreaking films that reminded me time and again that movies are alive and more vital than ever, like the heartbreaking Moonlight, the soul-stirring Queen of Katwe, the force-of-goodness 13th, the subtle and sweet…
Controversial opinion: Lists are a great way to both organize and digest horrifically large amounts of information. And they’ve never been more relevant than this, the Lord’s year, 2016, in television. There’s just too damn much, and nobody could possibly watch it all — except maybe Scott Bakula on a…
Whenever I tell someone I’ve been binging on Hallmark Christmas movies all day, there’s a certain amount of apology involved. “I know, they’re the worst,” I’ll concede, before the other person has had a chance to say anything. “The one I watched this morning was a real winner.” Usually whomever…
The first thing to say about Rogue One is that it might be the most visually splendid Star Wars movie to date — with its mist-covered mountains, its tsunamis of dust and fire, its X-wing fighters blazing through rainswept nights. I’ve never been a big fan of director Gareth Edwards…
Here’s a promise few movies can make. If you sink two hours into Collateral Beauty now, it’s guaranteed that for the rest of your life, when conversation stalls, you can save the night by asking, “Did you ever see that movie where Will Smith plays an ad executive so shut…
The cussedness of La La Land is almost enough to recommend it. Damien Chazelle’s sumptuous tribute to romantics trying to keep lit the fire of a guttering culture is defiantly old-fashioned in form and style. It is, among other things, a throwback to the great MGM musicals of the Gene…
The next step on Moonlight’s road to the Oscars played out this morning when the Golden Globes announced its 2017 nominations. The film, based on a play by Miami native Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by fellow Miamian Barry Jenkins, earned six nods from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, including…
Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival is back with their 34th edition this March and today organizers announced a double dose of excitement for audience members who want more diverse work. Not only is the Google Seminar Series on Gender & Racial Gaps in Film & Tech that launched last…
Welcome to Miami, Landmark Theatres. After a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason at the Shops of Merrick Park during a VIP preview reception Thursday, the anticipated grand opening the following day of the Landmark at Merrick Park had to be pushed back a week because of “technical issues.”
As praise for the Miami-made film Moonlight continues to build, its filmmakers and actors gathered at Miami Beach Cinematheque Thursday for a local look inside its creation. Actors Alex Hibbert and Jaden Piner, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, and director Barry Jenkins discussed the film in a Speaking in Cinema conversation led by Borscht Film Festival cofounder Lucas Leyva, resulting in one of the most revealing conversations about the film to date.
Incorporated comes on like the kind of TV show you think you have to pay close attention to. There’s more consideration of climate change in the tense Syfy dystopian thriller than in all four-and-a-half hours of this fall’s presidential debates. As the series opens, stern white titles on a black…
Filmmaker Faren Humes delivers work that feels relevant and necessary. Her short film Our Rhineland, about two sisters who took on the Third Reich as it rendered mixed-race Germans sterile, has earned her a Director’s Guild of America Student Film Award and an Academy of Television Arts & Sciences College Television Award…
Always the first festival that cinephiles anticipate in the new year, the Miami Jewish Film Festival returns this January. For its 20th year, the festival will present 64 films from 20 countries while hosting 50 filmmakers and special guests throughout South Florida.
Borscht Corp., the nonprofit organization that makes your favorite short films in and about Miami, has a lot of exciting news for the start of 2017. First up? For the seventh year in a row, Borscht-commissioned works are playing at the ever-growing Sundance Film Festival in January. Better yet: Borscht…
It’s December, which means it’s time to curl up in front of the TV in a fetal position and pray for 2017. Since this year has been Satan’s masturbatory fantasy, we deserve to glue our eyelids open and soak in the sweet, sweet escapism. And on January 1st, fortified by…
The great Mariah Carey once sang, “All I want for Christmas is classic movies.” OK, she might not have said those exact words, but who doesn’t want some good old-school movies to check out during the holidays? Miami has plenty for you this month, so get ready.
One reason why Isabelle Huppert makes suffering so compelling onscreen is her sheer … well, “unflappability” isn’t quite the right word. It’s a kind of ironic distance, perhaps: The actress can convey curiosity, bewilderment and coolness all at once, even as she deals with the most agonizing of circumstances. But…
