The Best Classic Films Showing in Miami in December

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays here in Miami, inside and out. Although it is still not particularly cold weather-wise, hopefully the theaters will crank the air to 30 and whip up a snowstorm during a film. December is here and so are a bundle of classic…

Chi-Raq, Spike Lee’s Best in Years, Looks to the Ancients

Oh, Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…

Stallone Won’t Let Creed Escape Rocky‘s Shadow

The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…

Migrant Drama Brooklyn Reveals Saoirse Ronan as One of the Greats

Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…

Old Ways Meet the New Reality in the Wondrous The Wonders

Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…

Trumbo Honors a Blacklisted Screenwriter With Drama He Would Have Cut

Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…

Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan Enjoys Its Second Coming-Out Gala

There are movies that aren’t for everyone, and then there are movies that ought to be stamped with a “Caution: Not for Everyone” disclaimer. Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is not only about rich teenagers — a common one-note villain in most American comedies. It’s also about old-money Manhattan teenagers…

Jessica Jones Is the Best Onscreen Drama Marvel Has Ever Made

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…

Theeb Director Naji Abu Nowar on Having His Film Return to Miami

Theeb, a foreign-language film from Jordan, made its South Florida debut during Miami Dade College’s 32nd-annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) earlier this year. During the festival, the film took the screenwriting prize and left audiences — and critics — in awe. Told from the perspective of the nomadic eyes…

Jennifer Lawrence and The Hunger Games Transcend the Blockbuster

With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games began in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…

In The Night Before, Seth Rogen and Company Grow Up — Again

How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…

All Angelina Jolie Pitt’s By the Sea Offers Is Location

It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense they were wounded,…

First Jane, Now Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The CW Gets What Young Women Want

We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…