The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York who’s striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through…
There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one we can probably agree on: Something has gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
While many of Oscar’s big shots clock in at more than two hours (led by favorite Boyhood, at 165 minutes), some filmmakers remain committed to telling unique and inventive stories that don’t require viewers to set aside an entire night to enjoy. The Academy Award-nominated short films — which, for…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Let’s leap back to 1994. Grunge and gangsta rap dominated MTV — music that claimed to be gritty and honest. Yet that year in Orlando, as far away from Seattle as it gets, a Ponzi-scheme scam artist named Lou Pearlman selected five lads aged 14 to 21 to form the…
Jude Law, once so shiny-penny-clean and pretty — and with the kind of chin dimple that might have inspired Audrey Hepburn to ask, as she did of Cary Grant in Charade, “How do you shave in there?” — is only now reaching the age where we can call his face…
This weekend at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, there was a double feature of films starring silver screen legend, Geraldine Chaplin. On Saturday, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago screened for its 50th anniversary, and on Sunday, it was Robert Altman’s turn. His beloved Nashville played to a nearly-full house, 40 years…
Miami has been the fictional home of some of television’s most iconic television shows: The Golden Girls, Crockett and Tubbs, and Dexter all lived in the Magic City. But if those are the only shows you can think of, then you’re missing an entire genre of amazing television filmed in…
The Miss Universe Pageant returned to Miami last night, and it was everything you expected it to be. Which is to say: leggy women wearing way too much makeup while strutting and smiling and showing off their bikini bodies in the name of national pride. The pageant may be a…
This Tuesday, the Miami Jewish Film Festival will feature a series of experimental, avant-garde films by two of contemporary movie-making’s greats. Bill Morrison and his regular collaborator composer, Michael Gordon, will appear for an evening of seven short films, conversation, and live music at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Morrision and…
When Miami-based filmmaker Kenny Riches got the call from the Sundance Film Festival, he could barely hide his excitement from close friend Robert “Meatball” Lorie. Riches’ film, The Strongest Man, had been accepted and Lorie was the film’s lead. They were both working on building the VIP section at Design…
Mortdecai is creeping into theaters with the flushed shame of a debutante who expects to be pelted with tomatoes. It’s a pity. In 1965, Mortdecai would be the hit of the year. Director David Koepp whips through this pop-colored caper about crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) — one…
We’ve already written about our excitement over the films at the Miami Jewish Film Festival and interviewed festival director Igor Shteyrenberg, but we haven’t had a chance to talk about what we’re looking forward to, as well as what we’ve checked out and loved. With MJFF already underway, it’s about…
The most pleasurably ludicrous highlight of The Boy Next Door comes a half-hour in, before the sex and murders and something-is-in-the-mirror-behind-her! jolts that stud the film like Flavor Crystals. The high-school English teacher played by Jennifer Lopez is dazzled by a gift from the handsome student (Ryan Guzman) who has…
There’s something bracingly honest about The Humbling, Barry Levinson’s movie about a 67-year-old Shakespearean actor, played by Al Pacino, who, after being struck with crippling anxiety, gets his mojo restored — some of it, anyway — by a manipulative muse (Greta Gerwig). Based on the 2009 Philip Roth novel of…
Each year, screenwriters kill off enough offscreen children to fill a Chuck E. Cheese’s. A dead son or daughter gives a movie the illusion of depth plus an easy explanation for whatever the script ladles on the surviving parents. Binge-drinking? Nymphomania? Sudden bouts of break dancing? Blame the wee coffin…
Every great scientist was once a kid, and every kid, as it turns out, is really a great scientist. “When you’re young, you know how to explore, innovate and investigate,” says FAU doctoral student and geologist Troy Berner. “As children, we’re born with these instincts, and it’s society that abandons…
The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’s great misfortune isn’t that it replaces The Colbert Report, but that it premieres after Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The Colbert Report was sui generis, and will likely remain so, because such a series makes leviathan demands on its host: crackerjack comedic skills,…
“The only way to escape the streets is to fight your way out.” That’s the life philosophy that pervades Miami filmmaker Billy Corben’s documentary Dawg Fight. The latest film from Corben’s studio, Rakontur, chronicles the underground backyard-fighting scene in Perrine, a suburb that’s just a few miles south of Miami…
How quickly things have changed in Cuba. After President Obama’s declaration of “normalized” relations between the U.S. and Cuba, Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s documentary Havana Curveball already captures what is, perhaps, a different Cuba. The new policy would have certainly made the mission of 13-year-old Mica Jarmel-Schneider a little…
Imagine living the first portion of your life as someone who identifies as something completely different than who you are, simply because your family insists they were that type of person. In a way, this is Lacey Schwartz’s story and her documentary Little White Lie shows just that. Schwartz, who…
