Women with disabilities aren’t exactly in the cinematic spotlight, which is an absolute shame because they’re just as deserving of representation as everyone else. And Laila, the main character of Margarita With a Straw, is no different than any other young woman her age, except for the fact that she…
A post-Wikipedia biographical documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck finds Brett Morgen constructing a feature-length collage of notebook entries, demo tapes, rehearsal footage, home movies, archival photos, and drawings and artwork by the late Nirvana frontman. It’s an impressive, comprehensive assemblage, designed to impart not a point-by-point historical account but,…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos, three enemies, and at least ten films to go before the climactic Avengers: Infinity War — Part II opens in May 2019.
It’s tempting to suggest that if you have any interest in Iranian film in general, or in particular Asghar Farhadi — the director and writer of that shred-your-heart masterpiece A Separation — you should simply get yourself to Farhadi’s About Elly without knowing a thing about it besides its title.
A normal movie ends with the American Humane Association’s assurance that “No animals were harmed.” But Tippi Hedren’s doomed 1981 obsession Roar isn’t normal.
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the way…
There are only a handful of films about cruising that actually work: last year’s Stranger by the Lake is an example of a deliciously rare work of art that maintained its initial seduction throughout the entire film. The Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival presents us with Amor Eterno (Everlasting Love),…
It’s hard to be a queer film lover sometimes; struggling to find movies that offer reasonable representation or narratives more interesting than “hunky gay man falls in love”. And, while those movies are going to get made and folks are going to watch them on Netflix, a lot of queer…
No one likes the idea of growing older, and anyone who claims as much is lying, either to you or to herself. The anxiety of aging actors is particularly acute, not necessarily because they feel the passage of time…
Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner has an unerring talent for examining, skeptically but never cynically, grand notions about destiny: What we perceive as — or have convinced ourselves to be — the workings of fate, whether religious or romantic, is ultimately better understood as arbitrary or coincidental occurrences. In Lourdes (2009),…
Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes…
It’s nearly impossible to convince the average American citizen, especially if he’s a straight man, that haute couture has a reason to exist. The phrase isn’t just a catchall for “really expensive clothes…”
Did you know there’s a new family-audience feature film that implies God nuked Japan because one plucky American moppet dared to dream? That’s no exaggeration.
The trolling is coming from inside the house! Mere emojis can’t capture the plugged-in joys of the first hour or so of haunted-internet teen flick Unfriended, which knives with dexterous wit The Way We Live Now.
No show wears its love for language and land more proudly than FX’s Justified, which ended its six-year run this week. Based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and starring squinty-eyed sex symbol Timothy Olyphant, the hillbilly noir never received the critical adulation or the audience one might expect for…
Miami is flourishing with theaters that showcase classic cinema on a regular basis. It’s gotten to the point where it’s practically impossible to keep track of how many there really are, to the point where March’s list became incomplete due to new additions throughout. As such, for April, we’re taking…
Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers.
Truth in film takes another jolly beating in Disneynature’s Monkey Kingdom, a documentary-like nature flick with the last-century chutzpah to pass off its marvelous footage of some months in the life of a single-mom macaque as a full-fledged princess story, with three acts, a tearful exile, and her ascent, in the final reels, to the throne. (Oops, spoiler for the anthropomorphized-monkey movie.)
For any thinking person, little in Josef Kubota Wladyka’s fleet and sweaty Colombian-smuggler thriller Manos Sucias will surprise. Drug-running is work for the broke and desperate; the runners might be less broke after a delivery, but that desperation only grows worse; killing is grim and painful and utterly unlike the…
Even if you think you don’t know the photographs of Sebastião Salgado, you’ve probably seen them. In one of his most famous pictures, taken in the mid-1980s in Mali, a woman whose face is half-hidden by a dark, rough-textured cotton veil, her bearing as elegant as anything you’d see in fashion photography, appears to gaze off into the middle distance.
The sequence that opens True Story tells you plenty about what you’re in for: A rumpled teddy bear drifts down from our vantage point like a puffy brown snowflake, landing with slow-motion deliberateness on the form of a PJ-clad toddler curled up in a suitcase, seemingly asleep.
In 1848, Euphemia Gray, a bright and pretty young girl from a family of modest means, left her home in Scotland to marry her era’s equivalent of an art-world rock star, the imposingly erudite critic John Ruskin. Perhaps as early as her wedding night, Effie knew she had made a…
