Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Like the small bit of concrete foundation embedded in the brick sidewalk that pokes out in an awkward triangle from under the post office wall on the corner of Grand Avenue and McDonald Street, my memories of the Grove Cinema are slight. The physical evidence of the art house is…
Well, folks, a month of horror and cooler air approaches and, boy, is it a fun one for the classics. With the Halloween spirit all around the place, an abundance of horror hits Miami, but it’s not solely limited to that. Without further ado, here are the classic films showing…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, exactly, onscreen — the…
Jafar Panahi looks happier than he has in a while — and he’s getting out. That’s encouraging, and it doesn’t mean that his latest act of defiance, the film Taxi, isn’t bold. Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran’s 20-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were, like, just ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
“I specialize in Aaron Sorkin jokes. They never fail at parties,” says filmmaker Leslye Headland over the phone while discussing her pop culture jokes in Sleeping With Other People. After hearing the joke, audiences either laugh-out-loud or wonder, “‘Wait, Aaron Sorkin’s a crack addict?’ Everyone’s on his Wikipedia [after that and]…
The Coral Gables Art Cinema will host the U.S. premiere for the Venezuelan film The Longest Distance (La Distancia Mas Larga) this Friday with a red carpet event featuring the film’s director. The debut feature by 37-year-old writer and director Claudia Pinto presents a profoundly heavy subject with a restrained,…
“Cuba’s been sitting here for what, 55 years. Half an hour away, basically giving the biggest superpower in the world the stiff middle finger.” In the season six premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s award-winning travel show, Parts Unknown, the food-loving host travels 90 miles south of Miami to savor some of…
1. “He meant well,” a ticket-buyer said, shuffling miserably out of a Thursday-night screening of Roland Emmerich’s calamitous Stonewall. “That’s got to count for something.” I don’t think that’s true. If those good intentions had counted, they might have inspired Emmerich not to trust himself to helm this fictionalized recounting…
To witness Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is to witness another era entirely, a realm that, for better or worse, no longer exists. Long, dreamlike shots that trail through locations both gorgeous and destitute, offering up four short stories that were meant to depict Cuban life during the early years…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
In the mid-20th Century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
Producer Armando Christian Perez. It rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? Nah — we’ll stick to Pitbull. Fox has bought the rights to a Miami-based drama series titled 305 and decided that’s there’s nobody better to help produce the project than Mr. 305 himself. Fox has chosen Sascha Penn…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
Jumping right into conversation with Anna Muylaert, whose latest film Que Horas Ela Volta (The Second Mother) is making waves worldwide and was just picked as Brazil’s Foreign Oscar submission, was as easy as pie. With her film playing the Brazilian Film Festival of Miami earlier this month and opening…
