The Best Things to Do in Miami This Weekend

The best time of the week is finally here — the weekend. The next three days are filled with music, art, parties, and boozy beverages galore. From Coral Gables to Little Havana to South Beach, these are the best places to be until the sun comes up Monday morning.

Confessions of a Reservoir Dogs Naysayer

Despite my fondness for Quentin Tarantino, I’ve never been a Reservoir Dogs fan. Back in 1992, the writer-director’s feature debut seemed to me little more than a clever and grotesquely violent one-act play, gussied up with structural whimsy. Yes, the opening scene — black-suited crooks bantering about Madonna and the…

Aziz Ansari’s Master of None Achieves Mastery at Last

There was never any doubt about the thoughtfulness with which Aziz Ansari, in the first season of his Netflix series, Master of None, addressed the kinds of societal divides — racial, cultural, generational, sexual — that most sitcoms either lack the vision to perceive at all or take on only…

Inside the Custom Cars and Family Drama of South Florida’s Lowrider Clubs

This Friday, the film Lowriders will debut on the big screen across the nation. Starring Gabriel Chavarria, best known for his leading role in East Los High; Theo Rossi of the Netflix series Luke Cage; and Desperate Housewives alum Eva Longoria, the film follows a young street artist surrounded by lowrider car culture, in which pros and amateurs alike customize their rides via hydraulic systems, dazzling designs, and other accoutrements.

Crime in Counterpoint: Michael Mann on His Restored Masterpiece Heat

Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece, Heat, comes out this week in a brand-new, fully loaded and beautiful Blu-ray edition. To explore further what makes this epochal crime drama so special, I recently talked to the director. The story of Heat was based on real-life personalities. There was real thief named Neil…

The 21 Best Things to Do in Miami This Week

Even though much of his work is inspired by Victorian-era occult and gothic romanticism, Hernan Bas exposes himself as a Miami native in the lush compositions and lurid colors of his paintings. The artist is more recently based in Detroit, but Bas will head back south to speak at…

Celebrating the Radical Female Gaze of Amazon’s I Love Dick

I Love Dick, the epistolary novel, is an obsessive confessional story from a woman — a version of the author Chris Kraus — who, in her letters, lusts for an English art critic named Dick. He barely returns the affection. Yet … she persists. The story is almost like a…

Lowriders Fixes Up Old Family-Drama Plot Points

A sleepy earnestness both ennobles and afflicts Ricardo de Montreuil’s fathers-and-sons story, Lowriders. At first the film plays as a low-key corrective, a Hollywood drama with name producers (Brian Grazer, Jason Blum) that, outside a couple of tutorial info-dumps covering cultural basics, presents East Los Angeles lives like pretty much…

Hernan Bas on Miami Culture and What Makes Art Gay

Young men’s heads bobbing in an ocean heavy with secrets painted on a folding screen. A flock of spoonbills flying by Stiltsville on a triptych. A sculpture of a dead flamingo, doubled over like a macabre midcentury modern table, chained to a metal ball. This is Hernan Bas’ “Florida Living.”…

David’s Been Here Host David Hoffmann Explored Miami and Then the World

You can take the boy out of Miami, but you can’t take Miami out of the boy. David Hoffmann has spent most of the past decade visiting 1,000 cities in 68 countries. Even when he’s back home, he turns a simple trip around the corner into an adventure. For Hoffmann, the element of discovery is everywhere, and though he’s been traveling, he hasn’t forgotten his roots.