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…
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 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…
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…
It can’t end like that, can it? Yury Bykov’s impressively bleak drama of bureaucracy, expedience, and the expendability of the poor seems to surge toward a finale that is both inevitable and impossible. The story, gutsy and wrenching, concerns a Russian plumber who susses out that a housing project in…
With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
Feminism in Hollywood is the newest case du jour. Everyone’s talking about it and young actresses are taking stands against the lack of representation and treatment of women in Hollywood. Just look at Emma Watson with her successful He for She campaign, and even teenager, and Girl Meets World star, Rowan…
It’s been some time now since David Oyelowo was nominated for a number of awards for his performance as Martin Luther King Jr.–- and snubbed at the Oscars — but the actor shows no signs of stopping. Last year, alongside Selma, he was featured in films like A Most Violent…
In 1985, Lupe Ontiveros played Rosalita, a clueless housekeeper who’s the butt of jokes made by 13-year-old Corey Feldman in The Goonies. In 1997, she played another housekeeper, who gets a door slammed in her face by Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. In her later years, she…
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…
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 uttering of the name Tony Nathan strikes a chord in most all Miami Dolphins fans; after all, the former all-pro Dolphins starting running back in Super Bowl XVII and Super Bowl XIX will forever go down as one of the greatest players in franchise history. However, what might not come…
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,…
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) —…
