Arts & Culture

Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…

Both a film noir and a candy-colored confection, Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is one of the most absorbing films he’s made in years. It’s also, perhaps, one of the saddest: Its bright hues and vivid textures offset a deep, unshakable melancholy. Based on a trio of Alice Munro short stories, Julieta…

There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…

Once upon a time, in the dark ages of not-that-long-ago, foreign television was a mysterious land beyond our reach. Aside from the occasional British import, the wonders of international series were limited to those equipped with multi-region DVD players. Scandinavian gloom mostly stayed in Scandinavia. Thanks to streaming, it’s now…

“Best films of 2016” lists are a dime a dozen this time of year. But even though 2016 was a disaster in many ways, it gave us plenty of great films by women. So just as we did in 2015 and 2014, New Times is running down the works that reigned above the rest. These are the 16 best films by women of the past year.

Carrie Fisher was always smarter than the words and roles written for her, smarter than what Hollywood thought it wanted out of a princess. On Christmas Eve of the all-devouring Sarlacc that is 2016, after word had spread that Fisher had suffered a heart attack, a page from her original The Empire Strikes Back script turned up on Twitter, courtesy of Will McCrabb.

As 2016 draws to a close, New Times is looking back at the year’s stories that had the most impact. Ten film and TV articles stood out from the rest, according to their high number of readers. This year, Miami readers proved to be an eclectic bunch, clicking on a weird mélange of pieces that one might not expect. So what’s on the list?

Nice girls play by the rules. They turn their shoulders inward and nibble on the ends of their slim fingers, nervous about all those difficult thoughts in their heads. And their hair is always perfect and feathery like a baby bird on a collector’s plate. If this description sounds angry,…