Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind had tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she…
This Jem is less a movie than an open-source brand launch: If you’re young and down or bullied or disconnected from the life around you, you could always slap on some glitter and film yourself singing as the cartoon-rock queen Jem. Aubrey Peeples, playing the singer, even gets a sort…
Sure, you can blame the aliens, the gophers, the monkeys and the fridge. But even without all those, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Harrumphing of the Whatsit likely wouldn’t have worked. Its director, you see, no longer finds it edifying to dream up new ways to kill America’s historical enemies…
Despite the versatility of his subjects, documentary filmmaker Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt acknowledges there’s a common thread throughout each of his films. “My films explore compelling characters presented in an observational style. I’m interested in unraveling an event as it’s happening, as a character is going for something they really want.” Perlmutt’s…
It has been eight years since Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s last movie, The Flight of the Red Balloon. Though that film was told through the perspective of a Chinese student living in Paris, his return to filmmaking couldn’t be more heavily rooted in Chinese culture with an intimate wuxia story…
Acting as a preview to the yearly Miami International Film Festival put on by Miami Dade College being held in March 2016, GEMS boasts a small collection of films screening at the Tower Theater daily starting today through Sunday. Compared to last year’s MIFFecito mini-fest, things look promising. The lineup,…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
When he was a young boy, Stephen Bogart remembers fondly a trip he took with his father, Humphrey Bogart, on a boat around the Catalina Islands in California. Stephen had a small plush skunk toy he used to play with by putting inside a crab trap cage. One night, he…
On Tuesday night, the Miami Jewish Film Festival presented a sold-out screening of Rhonda Mitrani’s Cuba Mia at Temple Moses. The film, which documents the story of a group of Cuban-born U.S. Jews who return to the Cuba of their childhood to find it both familiar and changed, also included a…
Acting as a preview to the yearly film festival being held in March 2016, GEMS boasts a small collection of films screening at the Tower Theater daily starting Thursday through Sunday. “GEMS is the name we came up with to best represent the personality of our new fall festival event,”…
Quick! Name the movie in which Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the…
A super naturalistic study in class, bureaucracy, and censorial stupidity, Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature, Court plants viewers in the plastic chairs of an Indian court of law as 69-year-old protest singer Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) is tried for a crime he didn’t commit by lawyers and a judge speaking a…
New this year to the Revolt Music Conference was the addition of their first annual Revolt Film Festival. While the music portion took place at the Fontainebleau this weekend, the film festival screened its inaugural five shorts at the Lyric Theater in Overtown on Sunday. The festival was hosted by…
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a great movie, be it the horror that thrills you, the drama that moves you, or the romantic comedy that pretty much shapes the way you dream of falling in love. And it’s even more satisfying to occasionally get away from the big ol’…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
It’s easy to say Miami is a weird city. Its reputation for freakishness is so well known, it seems to have been co-opted by cities like New York and Los Angeles. A shark on public transit? Miami had it first (and bigger). It doesn’t matter what L.A. says, Miami is the true capital…
Hopping off the set of season two of DirecTV’s original series, Kingdom, Natalie Martinez takes a break from filming in Los Angeles. The Miami native refers to the boxing series as a passion project and her voice gets noticeably giddier when she speaks about her work as Alicia Mendez. “It’s…
If you’re like me, a second generation Cuban-American, then you had (or have) a grandmother who grew up on the Caribbean island and one day was forced to leave everything behind in search for a more politically stable home. Life experiences like that tend to harden a person, and while…
After two successful years presenting retrospectives of Jewish filmmakers together, The Miami Jewish Film Festival and Miami Beach Cinematheque announce their 3rd annual Masters of Jewish Cinema series, featuring a retrospective celebrating Billy Wilder’s most iconic films. The series, charmingly titled Some Like It Wilder!, runs from October 14 through…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Aaron Sorkin opens a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The…
