“Wherever you live in this world, basically . . . you are alone. Even if [we] have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the…
Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…
A comedy about abortion. A documentary chronicling the gay experience in Israel. The avant garde work of a legendary film director. These are not obvious choices for a relatively conservative Jewish audience. But Miami Jewish Film Festival director Igor Shteyrenberg isn’t taking the obvious route to film festival success in…
For the first time in his life, actor Brontis Jodorowsky will have a few days to get to know Miami. Speaking via Skype from his home in Paris, the son of the legendary cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky says he has only ever known the city from within Miami International…
Some genres of film don’t get as much talk and praise as they deserve. Take sci-fi, for example; it’s so heavily loaded with big-budget flicks that the smaller works get lost over the years. And that means a lot of great works that never get seen by large audiences. Sure,…
A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia’s splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile-pukes its outrages with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. De la Iglesia doesn’t share those directors’ interest in making clear just why characters do the…
If you ever have days when you prefer animals to human beings, How to Train Your Dragon 2 is your kind of movie. In some ways, the second entry in this animated franchise is inferior to the first, released in 2010: The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the…
So far onscreen, Mexican narcoculture has generated mostly grim documentaries, but given the carnage and the proximity, you can easily imagine the movies coming from both sides of the border: the mezzobrow hand-wringers, the trigger-joy gangster trips, the based-on-true-story crusades. What we might not have seen coming is something like…
There’s still one kind of dread that today’s genre filmmakers can reliably stir up: that fear that everything we’ve been watching onscreen is going to be upended by some last-minute twist, that all the clues and portents we’ve puzzled over will be swept away in favor of some revelation so…
Remarkable as it seems, there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of kids tooling around with nothing much to do. Whether you grew up in a small town or a midsize-to-large city, in 1962, 1982, or 2002, you probably remember getting into a car, unwisely, with the first…
You could call it Bring It On meets The Craft and stop right there with considerable accuracy. But why would you, when All Cheerleaders Die actually delivers as much trashy, gory fun as a movie with such a title suggests? Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson’s teen horror romp benefits from…
Things are looking up for Miami moviegoers. Last month, Miami Beach passed an ordinance that would allow its Regal South Beach theater to sell booze to patrons. And now, North Miami Beach moviegoers are due to get their own luxury film-watching experience. iPic, a chain of upscale movie theaters serving…
There are filmmakers. There are auteurs. Then there is Alejandro Jodorowsky. No other movie director has shown such spirit open to creativity while holding such disdain for the commercialization of art. His first film, 1968’s Fando & Lis instigated fights in movie theaters. His second, 1970’s El Topo, heralded the…
Four large semi-trucks plastered with black and red ink spelling out the words “The Purge Breakout: Can You Survive the Night?” are set up in the middle of the lot in front of Mana Wynwood. As a clever promotion for the new upcoming film, The Purge: Anarchy, Universal has created…
To call The Dance of Reality, the new film by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a personal film, would be an understatement. Writing in his native Spanish, from his home in Paris, the legendary director says, “The purpose of all true art is to reveal to man the beauty of your own soul.”…
To Jose Antonio Vargas, Miami feels like home. “I love Miami because it reminds me a lot of Manila,” the Filipino-American filmmaker explains. “I don’t know why, but it does. There’s the weather, there’s the beach, and I just like getting lost in Miami… I mean, I can’t leave the…
Cancer, so costly in real life, can be thrown around pretty cheaply in fiction, which is why most cautious readers and moviegoers are wary of it as a plot element. Call it the Love Story syndrome. But the presence of mortal illness has always been a staple of romantic melodrama,…
The grand old dirty pope of midnight-movie voodoo and post-’60s turn-on, drop-out mythopoeia returns with a vengeance, in his autumnal phase and with, surprise, a personal look backward at his own childhood. The Dance of Reality might be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show…
In 1986, peaceniks were mad at Tom Cruise. That year, the Navy thanked Top Gun for boosting enlistment another 20,000 recruits. Since then, he’s made more critiques of military than advertisements, most of which (Lions for Lambs, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai, Valkyrie) j’accuse bad leadership…
The French film, opera, and theater director Patrice Chéreau, who died this past October at age 68, once told an interviewer that he saw human relations as being like rugby or football, in which “everybody is intertwined, and trying to kick everyone else.” Chéreau perceived love strategically, in terms of…
When Phil Lord and Chris Miller pitched their idea for a 21 Jump Street movie, a film everyone thought was, at best, a moronic moneymaker, they had one bold proposal: “What if the twist is that we try to make it really good?” says Lord. “That’s basically a summary of…
Multi-hyphenate actor Clark Gregg understands that hard work and perseverance don’t necessarily pay off in Hollywood. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1992, the star of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has directed two feature films and scripted three, none of which are the work he’s best known for. Gregg knows…
