Maybe it’s a cultural thing. In Hollywood movies, fat people are often the butt of jokes and more often than not, obese actors embrace the stereotype that they’re just funny-looking fools. So they take the parts and dive in with gusto to make careers exploiting themselves for ridicule. What makes…
After about an hour and a half meeting today, board members of the Coral Gables Art Cinema confirmed via vote that Nat Chediak will become the organization’s new director of programming. Press were not permitted inside the meeting, but members exiting this morning said it was a positive outcome. “Some…
With Lake Los Angeles director/writer Mike Ott presents a heart-rending but placid portrait of the often solitary pain of the undocumented immigrant. Ott effectively uses a quiet, low-key cinematic delivery that creeps up on the viewer for a simple, devastating finale that raises small gestures to noble acts of kindness…
The last time Nat Chediak found himself ensnared in a shakeup of a local cultural institution, he wound up on the wrong side of the power struggle. This time around, it appears luck is on the side of the co-founder and former executive director of the Miami International Film Festival…
“We like to think we are a humane country, but the way the United States treats their immigrants, particularly those from Latin American countries, is appalling.” Miami-born filmmaker Oscar Corral echoes the feelings of many in our city, thousands touched by the immigrant experience. His latest endeavor, The Crossfire Kids…
Though actor Roberto “Sanz” Sanchez lives in Los Angeles, he has a strong attachment to Miami. He grew up in Little Havana, after immigrating at 3 years old from Cuba to meet his mother in 1969. Tower Theater takes up a big part of his childhood memories in the neighborhood…
Borscht is officially back. The film fest dedicated to South Florida talent announced Wednesday that the “allegedly ninth” edition of the event will take place December 16 through December 21 this year. Since its first run in 2003, the Borscht Film Festival has evolved from a project of New World…
Following the recent resignation of longtime leader Robert Rosenberg, Coral Gables Art Cinema has selected Nat Chediak as its new program director. A source says an oral agreement between Chediak and cinema founder and former executive director, Steven Krams, will be confirmed at a meeting on Tuesday, October 14. Co-founder…
The Dracula Begins-style sword-and-fangs curio Dracula Untold plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace swapping out all of that bare-neck sensuality for some videogame ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of…
It says something about current global affairs that a movie set during the UK miners’ strike of the mid-1980s — an event that tore lives to shreds, representing a dismal and damaging period in late-20th-century British history — is likely to make you feel better rather than worse about the…
The best that can be said of The Pact 2 is that its existence might draw the attention of more viewers to The Pact, a superior indie creep-out from 2012 whose creator, the writer-director Nicholas McCarthy, fashioned it according to three inviolable principles. One: Get the heroine (Caity Lotz) into…
It was a mystery that reporter Gary Webb would have jumped on: a man who’d made powerful enemies allegedly committing suicide with two gunshots to the head. The tragedy is that Webb was the deceased. Michael Cuesta’s earnest, ire-inducing Kill the Messenger is a David-and-Goliath story where truth is the…
God save us from old coots and the actors who play them. Is that a terrible thing to say? Actors, like the rest of us, grow old, and there aren’t a whole lot of good roles available to them. But do we really need to see Robert Duvall playing a…
Groupie has come to be an ugly word, a misogynist dig that’s used all too casually by men and women alike. A groupie is a woman who doesn’t “do” anything; she gets all of her glamour via her association with a strong man, most often a rock star. How can…
Four years ago, comedian Bill Hader told his agent he wanted to do a drama. It took a while. “I used to think typecasting wasn’t a thing, and it totally is,” Hader admits. “That’s an industry feeling: ‘How can I take that person seriously when I know they’re capable of…
“I’ll always be anti-authoritarian, as long as I live,” says Terry Gilliam, the comic provocateur who’s been taking aim at the establishment for over four decades. The only thing that changes: his targets. In Life of Brian, it was religion. In Brazil, the government. And in his latest film, The…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, open this week’s podcast with a brief discussion of Twin Peaks, which comes back to TV via a series on Showtime in 2016, and move onto The Judge, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall,…
Last night, Oxygen network brought some new life to our fingertips with the premiere of Nail’d It. Yup, you guessed it, a reality show competition that has nail artists across the country competing for a grand prize of $100,000 and to be on the cover of Nail It! magazine. If…
Last time I wrote about the way Hispanic actors and actresses are shoved into stereotyped roles, people got frustrated. But guess what? A lot of people are just as frustrated by the fact that a beautiful Welsh actress just got handed a role that should have certainly gone to someone…
There are few things more terrifying than a scary story that’s based on some truth. Sure, when it comes to movie adaptations, Hollywood will exaggerate the gory details here and there, but the underlying foundation is real. Such was the case with last year’s The Conjuring, based on the lives…
Annabelle, an effective prequel to horror pastiche The Conjuring, surpasses its predecessor simply by virtue of occasionally being scary. Both films are over-reliant on deafening sound effects and side-eye glimpses of underwhelming ghosts. But Annabelle’s scare scenes are better paced and more thoughtfully lensed. Its hokey, funhouse-worthy spooks — a…
Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, along with LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson, talk about one of the big movies of the year, Gone Girl, which opens in about 3,000 U.S. theaters on Friday, but the trio also makes room for lesser-known films like The Blue Room, Men,…
