This year’s Miami International Film Festival includes one program so intensely native to the city that it’s titled “I’ve Never Not Been From Miami.” Premiering Monday, March 7, at the Olympia Theater, it includes ten short films that pair top independent filmmakers with vital artists. For many of those involved,…
This year, the Miami International Film Festival dedicates a significant portion of its lineup to female filmmakers. If you don’t have time to make it through the 20-plus films by women at the festival this year, check out our picks. Honorable Mention: WeinerEven before its debut at Sundance, Weiner had…
Using a single handheld camera, Israeli director Ido Haar spent several months in New Orleans with singer Princess Shaw. He claimed he was making a documentary about YouTube singers. In truth, he was documenting the raw beginnings of a viral video. It turns out a YouTube artist from Israel named…
The main offices for the 33rd-annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) are hidden within the 91-year-old Freedom Tower on Biscayne Boulevard. On a recent windy Monday morning, Jaie Laplante, the festival’s director of programming, laces his fingers around a paper coffee cup in the building’s shadow and shows off the…
Let’s give Gods of Egypt this much: An hour in, a giant cobra crashes and explodes like a bad guy’s car in a dumb movie from the ’70s. That snake, one of two in Alex Proyas’ film, is wide as a locomotive and long as a parade. It’s also straddled…
We’ve all been there. You finally get around to watching this year’s nominees, and you think, “Didn’t I see pretty much this same Oscar-bait movie last year?” You probably did, thanks to the McKee/Weinstein-driven formula behind most Best Picture noms. You can even build your own! Just mix and match…
If you’ve wondered just why Hollywood now so aggressively courts Chinese viewers, look no further than The Mermaid. In just two weeks of release, Stephen Chow’s fantastical comedy has already brought in $430 million in its home country, making it China’s highest-grossing release ever. (It’s doing well here, too, having…
The evolution of 35mm showings in Miami has been fascinating and no one has brought it all out to the population better than Secret Celluloid Society. Nearly two years after Nayib Estefan launched the midnight movie revival with Shirley’s at Gramps, and a year after he made the move to…
Bad cop movies — whether bad movies about cops or movies about bad cops — can be like those Arctic core samples from which scientists determine long-gone CO2 levels, though in this case they’re measuring American anxiety about police authority. Pop on John Hillcoat’s agonized pulp thriller Triple 9 in…
In the Winter Olympics, ski jumping is one of those sports — bobsledding and luging are others — where Joe and Jane Satellite Dish cannot tell the difference between a great performance and a terrible one unless the athlete is carried away on a stretcher. No doubt there are crucial…
In a September interview with GQ, Constance Wu, star of NBC’s Fresh Off the Boat, observed of the HBO series Togetherness, “It’s a show about white people.” She’s not wrong: Created by indie-film luminaries Jay and Mark Duplass, along with the actor Steve Zissis, Togetherness is a low-key look at…
There is precisely one attempted coup de cinema in the Jesse Owens biopic Race, which otherwise defaults to the backlot handsomeness of other Great Men tributes from Hollywood. In 1935, Owens (Stephan James), a freshman sensation on the Ohio State University track team, returns to the locker room after practice…
The centerpiece of Hail, Caesar!’s mid-century Hollywood satire is the eponymous film-within-a-film itself, an overwrought biblical epic in which a skeptical Roman centurion played by George Clooney has a literal come-to-Jesus moment. Risen, whose plot can be described in exactly the same way, never inspires one of its own. Co-writer/director…
A laugh comes at last just before the end credits of Robert Eggers’ lit-class horror-bummer The Witch: a boastful note attesting to the documentary truthfulness of the dialogue in the movie we’ve just seen. Over 90 minutes that prove shriekiness is no impediment to ponderousness, we’ve beheld the harrowing of…
Grown-ups may wince, but Paul Dalio’s earnest, ambitious manic-poet romance Touched With Fire is a gift to the young and passionately creative, to the brains-a-poppin’ kids caught up in invention and each other and the invention of each other. You don’t have to be bipolar to get caught up yourself…
Life is uncertain and ever-shifting in Luchino Visconti’s 1960 masterpiece Rocco and His Brothers, the tale of a family’s migration from farm life in southern Italy to Milan — and its near dissolution when faced with the city’s temptations. This 4K digital restoration is gorgeous, of course, brightening the corners…
On the surface, there isn’t much to object to in How to Be Single. Look, it says! No matter how fabulous their lives may seem, everyone wants to be happier and more fulfilled. Everyone is looking for something more, just like you! And really, Christian Ditter’s film (based on the…
The Albert Einstein quote “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” aptly sums up the point NatGeo’s hit show Brain Games tries to make. Our brains interpret information and influence every millisecond of our lives, yet the average person knows little about the most important part of the…
HBO’s Vinyl is the latest in a series of cultural hard-ons for the rough-and-tumble world of pre-Koch NYC: From novels like Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers and Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire to online photo galleries of graffiti-splattered subway trains and can-you-believe-this-juice-bar-used-to-be-a-crack-den slideshows, there’s a hunger for what Manhattan looked,…
The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…
It has been weeks since the Oscar nominees were announced and Carol, which many viewers and critics alike were rooting for, found itself robbed of a Best Picture nomination. “You know, it happens,” says the film’s producer, Christine Vachon, shrugging it off. “We got six nominations. I can’t engage in…
A guy I grew up with had the superpower to make anything dirty. No matter what you’d say to him, he’d manage to make it about his dick, or about anal sex, or about how girls — so he had heard — smelled like fish. I asked him what he…
