Terry George’s The Promise has the rare good fortune of turning up in theaters just weeks after another film showed how necessary a movie like this is. The second star-driven war-adventure film of 2017 to set a cross-cultural love triangle against the horror of the Armenian Genocide, The Promise would…
Two seemingly incongruous categories — the small-scale romantic doodle and the rampaging-creature feature — are brought together in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal, a film that never really fulfills the potential of its adventurous premise. This monster mash-up argues the opposite of what Humphrey Bogart declared in Casablanca: The problems of two…
Filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo has depicted many extraordinary events in his work: time travel, alien invasion, bomb threats, the apocalypse. His latest, Colossal, tells a tale of giant-monster attacks. “It’s always really exciting when you bring together the rules of fiction and the rules of reality, or rather the lack of rules of reality,” Vigalondo says.
Nasty, brutish and not short enough, Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire has a simple — and ultimately simpleminded — premise: to protract what would normally be a brief shoot-out scene to the majority of the movie’s 90-minute running time. On the surface, this reductio ad absurdum has a kind of pleasing…
“I’ve been trained for this.” Those words — or some variation — come up several times throughout James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and they serve as one key to this strange, sprawling, majestic film. In adapting the 2009 nonfiction book about the search for a fabled city in…
HBO’s acid-bathed Beltway satire Veep didn’t exactly predict our absurd political reality. But it did come close enough that revisiting past seasons is like watching footage of a train wreck run backwards in slow motion. The episode called “C**tgate” brought a vaginal euphemism into a presidential election. “Election Night” saw…
First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…
Obsolete Media Miami, our city’s repository for 35mm slides, archival motion picture materials, and other legacy media, has brought some of the coolest experimental art events to our city over the last few years: a side-by-side presentation of Dracula and Drácula, a 16mm film presentation brought to the massive…
In the spring of 1979, with a new film to promote, Woody Allen agreed to a lengthy profile in the New York Times Magazine. In it, Allen talks a little about Manhattan, the film in question, which follows an alter ego named Isaac through a period of professional and romantic…
The comforting analog clack of typewriter keys is a leitmotif in Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s slight but appealing adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (who knows why the subject of the original title was confusingly cast aside). In this tale of British filmmaking during World…
Holy motors! How will they top this one? This is perhaps the fastest and, if not, certainly the most furious of the Fast & Furious movies. The beauty of the Fast & Furious movies is that no car stunt is ever too nonsensical.
No matter your opinion of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a person, you can’t deny this: The man is a doer. And in Elliott Lester’s grief drama Aftermath, the ripped Renaissance man does a subtle, absorbing performance of despair so unlike his other work that his lined and laden face at times…
Somebody at Warners must’ve seen Going in Style, the 1979 film about old men robbing a bank, and decided that a happier, peppier version could be profitable. The original has no less than George Burns, Jackie Gleason sidekick Art Carney and method-acting legend Lee Strasberg as old fogies who decide…
It’s a good thing Jonathan Banks has such an interesting face. At the beginning of the third season of Better Call Saul, we spend a lot of quiet time with Banks’ surly, crooked-nosed cop-turned-criminal Mike Ehrmantraut of Breaking Bad fame, watching as he dismantles his own car and works out…
In Netflix’s new teen-suicide drama series 13 Reasons Why, pretty-boy Marcus (Steven Silver) tells good-guy Clay (Dylan Minnette) that whatever the kids did to Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) to make her kill herself was no different than what happens to any other girl in any other high school everywhere. And…
An interview with the director of the new luxury movie theater, CMX, set to open at Brickell City Centre at the end of April.
Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is the busiest man in Hollywood. He churns out movies faster than DJ Khaled can say, “Another one.” He’s the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, and he looks like he could line up for the Dolphins tomorrow at inside linebacker. He’s so awesome that in lieu of calling him by his awesome nickname, people now call him by the name his mother gave him at birth, just because he asked nicely.
“Do you feel that what you have to say in your films will continue to be different from other filmmakers?” Barbara McCullough asked Julie Dash around 1979 on The View, a student cable program at UCLA, home of the L.A. Rebellion movement — a constellation of black auteurs, like two…
Catch up on prior seasons of Vanderpump Rules on Hulu. Part one of the season five reunion airs Monday, April 3 on Bravo. Detractors of reality TV pooh-pooh the genre as a vacuous cesspool that celebrates crass idiocy and normalizes bad behavior that leads to societal horrors like our current…
From an inspiration for Beyoncé’s Lemonade to a protest against Trump’s proposed arts-funding cuts, these are the classic films showing in Miami in April 2017.
If civilization were to end tomorrow — and who the hell knows, it just might — we could learn a lot about building the next one from the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. Back in 1998, the Japanese director had his U.S. breakthrough with the wildly acclaimed After Life. Since then,…
Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be. This big-budget adaptation of the Japanese manga and anime classic (Masamune Shirow’s comic premiered in the late 1980s, Mamoru Oshii’s highly influential first film version in 1995)…
