“What a shitty place to die.” Whatever your feelings about Dallas, that’s a pretty harsh assessment. Then again, the character in Peter Landesman’s well-intentioned but unfulfilling Parkland who says it, an aide to fallen President John F. Kennedy, can probably be forgiven for his snotty Yankee attitude. Next month marks…
The most revealing film ever made about kids and the appeal of violent fantasy isn’t Battle Royale or an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. It’s the shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that a couple of Mississippi buddies put together over the course of their adolescence. Every…
The Great Santini with a pinch of Straw Dogs in French wine country, Gilles Legrand’s You Will Be My Son recalls the “A” pictures Hollywood has basically stopped making. Whether Legrand’s alternately compelling and clichéd drama of father-son struggles achieves the greatness of the aforementioned films is another matter. Paul…
A quietly profound study of a complex marriage between two artists, Cutie and the Boxer details the relationship of Ushio Shinohara — an avant-garde icon known for his motorcycle sculptures and “action paintings” created by punching a canvas with paint-coated boxing gloves — and his loyal wife, Noriko. With regular…
For anyone itching to see Stephen Dorff portray an Israeli POW, your opportunity has finally arrived. Zaytoun follows Dorff’s Yoni, an Israeli pilot imprisoned by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1982 Beirut. In captivity, he befriends Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a fast-talking 12-year-old refugee and one of the PLO’s newly…
Some movies are so tense and deeply affecting that they shave years off your life as you’re watching, only to give back that lost time, and more, at the end. Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is one of those movies. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney play astronauts — one a medical engineer,…
You think making it in the music business is hard? Tell that to Charles Bradley. But you might want to watch a documentary on his rise to the top first. The film Charles Bradley: Soul of America:, directed by Poull Brien and produced by Alexander Brough, follows Bradley through the…
In their experimental new film, Metallica endeavor to translate the anger and pain in their music into a visual medium. Directed by Nimród Antalis, Metallica Through the Neveris the band’s second big-screen effort, the first being being the 2004 behind-the-scenes documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. That debut, created by…
Michael Ealy as an android copWhat will the Los Angeles Police Department look like in 35 years? According to Fox’s Almost Human, yet another hourlong sci-fi drama overseen by J.J. Abrams (Alias, Fringe), crime will increase 400 percent and police officers will partner with humanoid robots to defend the city…
Another Miami show cancelled, another auction of epic proportions. Magic City, the Starz timepiece drama set in the late 1950s South Florida, has met its end, and now there’s a heaping amount of set pieces to be rid of. The short-lived series told the story of a hotel mogul, Ike…
Ilan Hall, chef-owner of the Gorbals restaurant in downtown L.A.It began as a simple duel: two line cooks pitted against each other for culinary bragging rights in the kitchen of downtown L.A.’s the Gorbals. It was after-hours, ringmastered by chef and owner Ilan Hall. Sometimes Hall would compete for old…
If you’ve been following the quest of Miami realtor Katrina Campins to sell houses to the South Florida elite, you probably need a more constructive hobby. And now, the TV station formerly known as the Style Network is forcing you to find one. The Style Network, which was known for…
Breaking Bad, that badass, rocking and rolling television series you’ve been following for the past five years, is coming to an end. This Sunday, you’ll say goodbye to Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, possibly in more ways than one. Fortunately, local public-relations maven JennyLee Molina, president of JLPR, realized we…
It’s 1976, a year when all the groovy girls are traipsing around in tiny suede skirts and all the cool guys have Badfinger hair. One of those guys was English racing driver James Hunt, the charismatic rapscallion who won that year’s Formula One World Championship — the embroidered badge on…
With so many violent movies and lurid movies and straight-up bad movies, most of them just so much murderous product, it’s rare anymore to be seized by that feeling, as a film plays, that maybe there’s no reason for this particular violent or lurid or bad movie to exist. They…
When it’s concerned with the most trying of lives in the most troubled of regions, it can feel petty to complain that a tragic-minded romantic thriller is laying things on too thick. Out in the Dark is the story of a closeted gay Palestinian man who falls in love with…
Isaiah Washington didn’t want to play John Allen Muhammad, the Beltway Sniper who triggered three weeks of terror in 2002. The man — make that murderer — felt too familiar. Like Washington, Muhammad was a veteran and a father of three. Both were analytical, observant, and quick to vent their…
The last time the men in Metallica made a documentary, they let the cameras into their therapy sessions, their private lives, their struggles with their families. It wasn’t good for their image, but it made for a compelling film. This time, they reverse tactics. In Metallica: Through the Never, the…
Kids are assholes, or at least cartoons think so. Animation has inked a grand tradition of cruelty, from Wile E. Coyote’s countless failed firebombings to modern-day kiddie cash-grabs where the most common punchline is a fall or a fart. Can’t we all just get along? In Cody Cameron and Kris…
To paraphrase the Bee Gees, Joseph Gordon-Levitt should be dancing. He’s already done it in (500) Days of Summer, where he led an exuberant ensemble routine that out-Dr Peppered any Dr Pepper commercial. Then there was his smashing Saturday Night Live re-creation of Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh” — like…
Mild spoilers up to The Bridge’s ninth episode below. Artisanal murders are all the rage these days. On Showtime’s Dexter, NBC’s Hannibal, and Fox’s The Following, small-batch, labor-intensive, sold-with-a-story slaughters have become TV’s equivalent of the Cronut. Handsome, intelligent, and mannered as court eunuchs, serial killers have become the new…
Written, produced, directed, and edited by Rena Riffel, who also reprises her role as Penny from the original Showgirls, Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven has been available on VOD for at least a year, but is now being released on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing, thus conferring onto it the…
