There’s a lot to laugh at in Daniel Lee’s faux-historical Silk Road adventure Dragon Blade, not least of which is the sight of Adrien Brody as corrupt Roman consul Tiberius wearing a tumble of raven-colored beauty-queen curls and purring in a phony British thespian’s accent. With his blue crushed-velvet cape…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor, and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
There’s a strain of science fiction writing that evokes a chilly kind of coziness, usually by introducing us to individuals or small groups of people who have found their way to the country in the hope of escaping encroaching doom. John Wyndham’s bleak, beautiful 1951 novel The Day of the…
This mean and vigorous men’s adventure pulp throwback has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret seeing. The trailers, teasing the story of a toothsome American family hunted by peasant-rebels in…
Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker’s rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with Amy Nicholson of the LA Weekly, run down the worst and best of the movies they saw this summer, which as summers go, wasn’t so terrible! Among the best performances were those by Sam Elliott, wonderful in two movies,…
It’s been over a year since the first time I met Nayib Estefan in the back room of Gramps, just as he was starting up Shirley’s and telling me just how badly he wanted to bring classic films to Miami through Secret Celluloid Society (SCS). To think that over that…
Sometime in the 1980s, Marlon Brando had his face digitized, presumably as a way of leaving just a bit more of himself after his departure from this planet. As we see it in Stevan Riley’s documentary Listen to Me Marlon, that speaking, moving hologram looks like a cross between George…
Remake The Graduate today and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, “Startups.” Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly that people may not notice.
“You could make five different N.W.A movies. We made the one we wanted to make.” That’s director F. Gary Gray during an audience Q&A after a recent screening of Straight Outta Compton, the long-awaited N.W.A movie. In our review, Amy Nicholson writes that there’s much more to the group’s story:…
The influence of David Fincher’s Se7en on Hollywood has been profound; from 8mm to Minority Report. Now you will find that influence in a starkly serious detective story from Spain called Marshland (La isla minima), which will have its U.S. theatrical premiere in South Florida this Friday, after first premiering…
The world of film noir is peopled with melancholy men trying to do the right thing even when they don’t quite know what the right thing is. Always — always — they fall for the wrong girl. Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins — the highly principled, if confused, heart of Carol…
Promising and disappointing all at once, Jon Watts’ back-roads thriller Cop Car heralds the arrival of a significant director, one adept not just at the usual action and suspense but also at the fleet, affecting depiction of lives as they’re actually lived. In the opening scenes, the camera glides alongside…
Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive, and horrific and perhaps the most romantic film of the year. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart star as Mike and Phoebe, two West Virginia stoners blissed out on weed and each other. “We’re the…
In a world gone mad for superhero movies, what chance does the light spy caper have? Audiences will put total faith in a guy wearing a red metal suit, but the soft woolen folds of the bespoke kind barely register. When a whole city can be blasted to smithereens thanks…
Less than a generation ago, Yonkers, New York became the face of segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation in my backyard. A federal court order to construct 200 units of low-income residences east of the Saw Mill Parkway, i.e., in the white part of town, led to riots and bombings, death…
One of this year’s most poetic documentaries, The Look of Silence, is also one of the most important films of the year. It’s because it asks you to understand: what do you do when there is no justice after your neighbor has picked up a machete to kill your son…
Halloween may be a ways away, but that doesn’t stop the early preparation for the horror! As stores slowly but surely begin to prepare for an event that’s months away, Miami’s film community is doing the same. And the fun this October launches the very first day of the month,…
In the holy trinity of N.W.A., each icon had a power: Dr. Dre produced, Ice Cube wrote the words, and Eazy-E was the comic relief. N.W.A.’s biopic, Straight Outta Compton, blurs those roles. Both Dre and Cube produced the film and seem to have edited the script with a red…
In 2012, documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer made a splash with The Act of Killing, in which he sought out members of Indonesian killing squads, individuals who murdered thousands of innocent citizens accused of being communists after a military takeover in 1965, and invited them to reenact their crimes in the…
