Hey, yo. It’s 4/20. Know what that means? It means a whole day celebrating the gloriousness that is weed. And part of that celebrating includes three things: smoking, eating, and watching movies. Every year, you’ll see lists that tell you what the best movies to watch while high. Those will…
Each act in Mountains May Depart, Zhangke Jia’s latest disquisition on China in the 21st Century, takes place in a different time period with a steadily escalating aspect ratio: 1999 in 1.33:1, 2014 in 1.85:1, and 2025 in 2.35:1. As time moves forward, the possibilities expand in kind, with the…
Careful what you wish for. When it was announced that Jessica Chastain and Emily Blunt would be joining Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth for the followup to 2012’s humdrum action/fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman, many filmgoers, myself included, got unduly excited. The original film, while a hit, had…
North Miami-born-and-raised writer/director Kelly Reichardt is a well-respected indie filmmaker. More than 20 years after she debuted her first film at Sundance Film Festival in 1994, River of Grass has been restored and re-released. For three nights only, it will screen at the Miami Beach Cinematheque beginning Wednesday, April 20. The…
The musician biopic might be stale and stupid as a genre, but it will endure. Each new one offers the possibility of the wondrous thing that made Hollywood into Hollywood: presence. You can guess from the trailers that I Saw the Light might be a botch job as drama, but…
Deep into her earnest, uncertain Nina Simone drama Nina, writer-director Cynthia Mort at last musters up a sequence of gravity and power. The inimitable Miss Simone — imitated here by Zoe Saldana — reads a letter from a woman who has recently lost her mother, a great Simone fan. It’s…
By now, the internet has offered plenty of images of actor Oscar Isaac as the omnipotent deity in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse. But amid all the commotion surrounding the release and while the actor is filming Star Wars Episode VIII, the Miami native took time out of his busy schedule to…
What do you get when you make a superhero movie with a male lead but keep your female audience at the forefront in your decision-making? Apparently a box office hit. By now, you’ve probably heard about the wild success of the little superhero film that could: Deadpool. Nobody expected much…
Hardcore Henry screened as a midnight movie at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and was so ecstatically received that a distributor bidding war ensued. Six months later, the film has hit theaters nationwide and fallen flat, thanks to intensely negative reviews from critics upset by its unceasing violence. It didn’t…
The effortless charisma of Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, the headliners of the first two Barbershop movies (released in 2002 and 2004), helped keep those over-plotted comedies buoyant. Cube and Cedric are back as Calvin and Eddie in Barbershop: The Next Cut, but even their enormous appeal can’t rescue…
Here’s about as convincing an argument as I can imagine for the existence of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Disney and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book reinvigorates an oft-told tale with star power, technology and calculated charm. It’s been billed as a live-action remake (it’s too good to be called a…
Born and raised in Miami, actress Suki Lopez, age 26, has only ever known diversity and inclusion. Only hen she first moved away from home around four years ago did she start to experience life outside a sheltered bubble. She lived briefly in Los Angeles before settling in New York…
Here’s a question faced by the creators of almost every superhero adaptation: How do do you pull this off without copying Frank Miller’s Batman? Too many modern superhero dramas — including the Dark Knight films, Arrow, Daredevil and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — either ape the dour realism…
One day in 1994, residents of Little Havana and Downtown Miami heard a loud boom. It wasn’t a hurricane or a riot or anything dangerous. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing some shit up with a big-ass, fake Harrier Jump Jet. True Lies, the action comedy about a secret agent that…
In Jeff Nichols’ gripping domestic thriller Take Shelter, Michael Shannon played a family man convinced that Armageddon was upon us. But even as the character’s visions compelled him to take more and more extreme precautions, the film remained fixed in the world of the real. It was a portrait of…
Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 high school stoner classic Dazed and Confused, but in some key ways it feels closer to his animated 2001 philosophy bull session Waking Life — a freewheeling grab bag of ideas, ruminations and loose ends…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
The Chet Baker portrayed by Ethan Hawke in Robert Budreau’s misty biopic Born to Be Blue is midway between beauty and ruin. Behind him are the 1950s, when his easy virtuosity and matinee-idol looks swiftly took Baker from Charlie Parker’s sideman to major player on Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
There are a whole lot of classic films showing throughout Miami, which is pretty damn exciting. Here’s what to look forward to in the month of April: Cosford Cinema The Douglas Sirk retrospective that kicked off in March with All That Heaven Allows (and a film it inspired – Far From…
Superhero fans may not know stunt coordinator Philip J Silvera’s name, but they do know his work. Silvera’s choreography turned heads in such recent comic-book adaptations as the Arkham Knight and Arkham Origins Batman video games, the record-breaking Deadpool film and Netflix’s Daredevil. Silvera’s imaginative, brutal work on Daredevil’s first…
