Do your wildest dreams include people watching you eat, sleep and (if you get lucky) have sex? CBS’s long-running voyeur wet dream is casting for season 16, and they’re making a stop at Cameo this weekend. Big Brother is watching – if you want. If exhibitionism is on your list…
After a whirlwind week and a half, the 31st Miami International Film Festival is in the can. We enjoyed tons of great films from the 97 features screened. We helped shine a spotlight on some local talent, attended some world and regional premieres, even snagged some red carpet chats with…
Most people these days spend the greater part of their waking lives looking and interacting with screens. As devices, apps and software continue to draw us into alternate realities, China stands as the only country in the world to classify internet addiction as a clinical disorder. Does this mean the…
We’ve been told to never judge a book by its cover, but we secretly always judge a movie by its teaser image. Skimming through the program of the Miami International Film Festival, there’s one image that stands out of a man in a royal blue suit. It’s Jude Law like…
One of the trickier brands of comedy to pull off is deadpan humor. There’s a subtle sense of timing required and actors must deliver immensely sincere performances without going over-the-top. All About the Feathers (Por La Plumas), a little film from Costa Rica achieves this with warm wit that harnesses…
One of the most atmospherically doom-laden works of this year’s Miami International Film Festival has to be The Summer of Flying Fish. It’s the first feature by Chilean director Marcela Said, whose filmography includes four feature documentaries that date back to 1999. Her documentary work has mostly focused on her…
If you’ve wandered the streets of Miami with your eyes open (and hopefully you have, because these drivers murderous), you’ve undoubtedly seen the abundant advertisements for Miami International Film Festival plastered among bus stops and roaming taxis. If you have, you’ll also recognize the face of MIFF 2014 as an…
The beauty of the Miami International Film Festival is how it features plenty of up-and-coming filmmakers and short films, while at the same time sprinkling in the occasional big name or two. Featured in the program this year is a film starring Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard, who are by…
Still fiending for more film greatness? Don’t sweat it, because the 31st-annual Miami International Film Festival is only half-finished. Theaters from South Beach to Wynwood to Coral Gables are still screening features long and short, foreign and domestic, starring big names and hot upstarts, with plenty of red-carpeted premieres to…
According to lore, Liberace used to greet the tourists who’d come by bus to gawk at his bejeweled home with the line, “I hope you like it. After all, you paid for it!” Not everyone has to like Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, the feature-length incarnation of his much-loved television series,…
Think adapting War and Peace is difficult? Try adapting the racecar videogame Need for Speed. Tolstoy’s 1,225-page behemoth has nothing on the Electronic Arts franchise’s irreconcilably complicated 20-year, 20-installment history: Sometimes cars are subject to physics; sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they’re invulnerable; sometimes they break. Maybe you’re in London; maybe…
Tyler Perry probably wishes he’d been raised by a single mom. As he has said in interviews, his father, Emmitt, was abusive and once beat him so hard with a vacuum hose that his skin felt flayed. In response, the writer-director reveres mothers, synthesizing his mom and aunt into the…
The second and final weekend of the Miami International Film Festival now approaches, and there is still so much to see. This year has proven especially rich in finely executed cinema, but no sane person can see it all, especially since many screenings overlap (it’s no easy task coordinating close…
One of the subtle ways the Miami International Film Festival has reinvented itself for its 31st year is presenting a festival that only projects digitally. There is not a single 35mm film in the festival. It marks a new era in cinematic presentation, and, over the weekend, one of the…
If you were to survey people who pay attention to movies — to go door-to-door with a clipboard, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, and a sheaf of forms with the word SURVEY printed in clean block letters across the top, later to be tabulated on a vintage Underwood adding machine…
As of this writing, the Netflix Instant catalog boasts more than 10,000 titles available for online streaming — a number that, as per the official Netflix rhetoric, seems colossal. But the landscape of this digital paradise may not be quite so idyllic. As classic film enthusiast Jaime Christley reminds us,…
During one scene in Monica Peña’s debut feature, the cryptically-titled Ectotherms, four young people nestle in the shade between two derelict double-decker buses and bitch about their high school grades. The scene unfolds in an unseen lot in Miami. The surreal presence of buses normally seen on the streets of…
On March 5, the Miami film community rejoiced at the announcement that the Miami Community Redevelopment Agency, headed by chairman Marc Sarnoff, is set to invest $11.5 million of taxpayer money to transform the downtown school board skills center into the new 70,000-square-foot Miami Entertainment Complex (MEC). MEC, to be…
it’s all in the reflexes.” Few actors have had better ones than Kurt Russell, who makes a welcome return to theaters this weekend in The Art of the Steal. Having been largely MIA since starring in Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 Death Proof, Russell remerges at an opportune time, since there’s still…
No Hollywood director could get away with pushing the limits of awkward pubescent sexuality quite like Mexican filmmaker Fernando Eimbcke in his latest film, Club Sandwich. Eimbcke goes places beyond cringe-worthy that will feel strikingly real to anyone who’s survived that terrible transition phase. He has no shame exploring –…
Though seemingly far from over, John Turturro’s career received a crowning award from the Miami International Film Festival Sunday night. The beloved character actor and director arrived in Miami to receive his 2014 Career Achievement Award on stage at the Olympia Theater at Gusman Center for the Performing Arts. The…
Before there was Grumpy Cat, or Nyan Cat, or Lil Bub, there was Cherry Pop. A sweet, fluffy purebred Persian cat, Cherry Pop was the apple of her owner’s eye. Her owners also happened to be filthy rich and spoiled her rotten. In Cherry Pop: The Story of the World’s…
