Billy Corben’s Rakontur Studios Wins Emmy for The U Part 2

The most recently eligible batch of 2014 ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries  included Miami-based studio Rakontur’s Billy Corben directed  The U Part 2,  won the Emmy for Most Outstanding Sports Documentary Series this past week. Corben’s “The U Part 2” picked up where his original 2009 film about the University of…

The Black Panthers Roar Again in a Vital New Film

The title The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution might seem tragic. Stanley Nelson’s welcome doc banners the Black Panthers as the “vanguard” of the revolution, a claim that’s true according to the Panthers’ own terms. The leather-jacketed crew carrying rifles onto the floor of the California state assembly in…

The Intern Works Hard to Be With It, but De Niro Is Hardly Working

Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer/director Nancy Meyers’ The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…

Black Mass Is Strong, but Johnny Depp Is Not Back Yet

James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…

Breathe Shows That Nothing Is Scarier Than Teendom

Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That’s particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends…

The Twist? The Visit Is the Third First-Rate M. Night Shyamalan Film

Who saw this coming? The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan’s witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an 11th feature, is its writer-director’s best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it’s the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what’s-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan’s basement-wandering simulator,…

New Miami-Based Fox Series Rosewood Will Premier This Month

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a television crime drama is being filmed in Miami. I know, groundbreaking stuff.  Fox debuts Rosewood September 23rd at 8 p.m., the newest version of a who-done-it placed with a backdrop of beautiful Miami. Rosewood is based on the main character Dr. Beaumont Rosewood, Jr. (Morris Chestnut) —…

What Could Beat Cruising With Grandma Star Lily Tomlin?

It’s a perfect summer afternoon in Los Angeles, and Lily Tomlin wants to do everything: drive to Neptune’s Net in Malibu, explore the L.A. River, tour Koreatown, grab cocktails in West Hollywood. She jumps in her 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer — her other car, a Prius, balances out its ecological…

Miami International Film Festival Announces GEMS Line Up

Knowing full-well that Miami can never get enough films, The Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) brings back their Fall film event with a make-over of sorts, and it’s a damn good one. GEMS offers up fourteen feature films exclusively at MDC’s Tower Theater Miami, among other events, to satiate filmgoers…

Learning to Drive Gets Moving Only as It Ends

There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…

Elisabeth Moss Makes Queen of Earth‘s Retro Unspooling Vital

Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city-dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks to the country to spend a week with her best friend,…