Miami Our City Celebrates Melting Pot of Latino Cultures

If you have ever watched a documentary film about Latinos in Miami, there’s a good chance it focused on a specific group of immigrants — like Cubans of the ’50s. But have you ever seen a film that represents our diverse city’s entire Latino community? Miami Our City: The Documentary, a…

Popcorn Frights Film Festival Announces 2016 Lineup

Forget Halloween as the time to indulge in all sorts of horrific goodies. The Popcorn Frights Film Festival is back, and it’s got bigger films, bigger ambitions, and a bigger lineup. The fest will take place in August instead of October this year. This edition of Popcorn Frights will offer…

Léa Seydoux Enthralls in a Patchy Diary of a Chambermaid

Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a 1900 novel about the depravities in all social strata written from the point of view of a servant named Célestine, has famously been adapted twice before, by two of cinema’s immortals. Benoît Jacquot’s uneven take on the material won’t challenge the stature…

Genius Dramatizes Editor Maxwell Perkins’ Shaping of Thomas Wolfe

If you can get past the spectacle of British and Australian actors portraying some of the most important figures of 20th-century American literature, Genius is a good example of a prestige pic that is not only literate but surprisingly vibrant. It’s the story of the tumultuous relationship between hot-tempered, Asheville-born…

Pixar Dives Under the Sea Again — and Into Memory Itself

Finding Nemo may have been a cartoon about a clownfish traveling across the ocean looking for his son, but it was also one of Pixar’s first overt forays into the workings of the human mind. The film, from 2003, was haunted by loss: The protagonist, Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks),…

Tsangari’s Chevalier Studies a Man-Pack in Competition

With the perfect timing of a deadpan comic and the keen observational skills of a zoologist, Athina Rachel Tsangari highlights just how bizarre the most banal of human activities can be. In Attenberg (2010), the filmmaker’s previous feature, walking itself is presented as a deranged means by which to move…

The New Conjuring Can’t Measure Up to the Old Conjuring

Back in 2013, James Wan’s The Conjuring represented the high point of a wave of mainstream horror that showed there was still value in old-school scares — that there was life beyond torture porn and slick slasher reboots. It was a ghost story-turned-possession thriller that mined terror out of the…

TMNT: Out of the Shadows and Out of Ideas

There’s something satisfying about hearing Tyler Perry, as mad scientist Baxter Stockman, say the words “Eliminate those turtles,” but it’s not quite novel enough to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows up to street level and out of the sewers. Early on, giant squid-like brain Krang (Brad…

Classic Films Showing in Miami in June

June is an exciting time for people who love movies because it’s Miami Film Month. All throughout the next four weeks, the art cinema scene will be offering $8 tickets (so you’ve got a good excuse to check out both moderns and classics). This includes all of O Cinema’s locations,…

Netflix’s Suspenseful Happy Valley Focuses on Police Work as Social Work

If mid-century pulp and noir gave us the cynical, quippy hardboiled detective, then Peak TV has given birth to its successor: the charbroiled cop, a bitter, corrupt, philandering, violent, addicted, nihilistic or just psychotic contemporary crime fighter. The supposed irony of this figure is that he (almost always a he)…

Yes, Comedies Look Better Than They Used to — Brandon Trost Is Why

“Did I want to shoot comedies?” asks Brandon Trost, director of photography on two of this summer’s funniest films, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising. “It’s funny — not at all.” But then came MacGruber, Jorma Taccone’s 2010 SNL film.“The director wanted me because I wasn’t…

At Its Best, Lonely Island’s Popstar Blows Up Our Pop Moment

It’s a feat to out-idiot TMZ culture. In achieving that, the fake-doc white-rapper satire Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a breakthrough for studio comedies, which here at last catch up to the metabolism and meaninglessness of the internet age. In its generous, frenetic first hour, Popstar’s jokes and parodies…

Migrants Adopt New Lives and New Selves in the Unsettling Dheepan

Not much has been heard from Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan since it won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, beating out pictures like Todd Haynes’ Carol, László Nemes’ Son of Saul and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin. But going into this understated film cold isn’t a bad way to…