Miami has a storied history in film. It’s been the setting for movies such as Goldfinger, Scarface, The Birdcage, and War Dogs. The Miami Film Festival has repeatedly made history. Award-winning actors (Matt Damon, John Travolta) and directors (Michael Bay, Brett Ratner) have called the city home.
Life is in the details, and the remarkable yet frustrating eight-part miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan, of which four episodes have aired so far, is at its best when it captures the quiet textures of a given day: Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon), waking up at 5 a.m. on the first…
This April, let us celebrate the glory of the flowers blossoming in vaginal fashion by only highlighting shows created by women. The list will be shorter than usual because Hollywood hates women, and we aren’t allowed to create magical stuff, and the world is worse off because of it. Anyways,…
When writer/director Osgood “Oz” Perkins asked his musician brother Elvis to score his first film — a demonic-possession horror pic starring Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton and Emma Roberts called The Blackcoat’s Daughter — Elvis, he says, was “cavalier” about it. Elvis expected to learn the process through doing, and Oz…
The premise for Charlie McDowell’s The Discovery is so simple and poetic that it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been done before: A scientist discovers definitive proof of an afterlife, and the world responds with mass suicides. McDowell, who scored a sleeper hit with The One I Love — which…
Unpromisingly, Five Came Back, a series that surveys the military service of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler — who cut off their Hollywood careers to serve in the Second World War and were thereafter irrevocably changed both in profession and in life — opens…
The Boss Baby might look, at first, like any other major studio animation release. Directed by DreamWorks vet Tom McGrath (Madagascar, Megamind), the movie hits all the expected notes: the enduring importance of family, the persistence of untrustworthy/clueless adults, and the inherent hilarity of shoehorning David Mamet dialogue into a…
No director in America is hotter today than Miami’s own Barry Jenkins, fresh off his film Moonlight’s three Oscar wins, including Best Picture. No author had a bigger 2016 than Colson Whitehead, whose The Underground Railroad won a National Book Award and a favored spot on President Obama’s reading list.
Niki Caro has the rare ability to elevate what could be emotionally manipulative schlock to earnest art. To judge by the trailer, her low-budget breakthrough feature Whale Rider (2003) seemed a straightforward children’s drama about a girl overcoming the odds — tame, commercial Disney fare. But the film itself proved…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
CHIPS is the latest kitschy-yet-beloved cop show to get remodeled on the big screen as a bromantic buddy comedy. However, unlike the way the movie versions of Starsky & Hutch and 21 Jump Street played up those shows’ alleged homoeroticism for ironic, lighthearted laughs, CHIPS lets it be known from…
The marriage between HBO and Dwayne Johnson takes the next step Monday when Rock and a Hard Place, a documentary Johnson produced, airs on the channel. The documentary follows incarcerated juveniles looking to cash in on a second chance as they attempt to conquer and complete the Miami-Dade County Corrections & Rehabilitation Boot Camp…
Just last month, the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival had a ball at the University of Miami, where the fest hosted a series of film screenings, workshops, and virtual-reality and mixed-reality experiences. Now that the latest edition of the festival is in the rear-view mirror, what have the FilmGate Miami folks…
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters airs March 26, PBS Some of us can never have too much of the Brontës. But I understand if your response to another dose of costume drama on the moors is “Shoot me now.” Reader, be strong! If you were dead, you’d be deprived…
Dr. Michael Salzhauer, one of the most famous and successful plastic surgeons in Miami, is also one of the camera-friendliest. He’s built his business in large part through viral videos and social media stunts. Now he’s taking the next logical step: starring in his own reality TV show. This Friday,…
The antagonistic atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair relished it when Life magazine called her “The Most Hated Woman in America” in the 1964 profile that only heightened her notoriety. That designation followed the 1963 Supreme Court ruling on Murray v. Curlett (and another lawsuit) that ended Bible-reading in public schools. Director…
Gina Prince-Bythewood has directed two of the most devastatingly romantic films of this millennium — Love & Basketball (2000) and Beyond the Lights (2014) — so it might seem odd at first to see her at the helm of a TV show about police violence, unsolved murders, and race relations…
The beginning marks the beginning of the end: A middle-aged man rouses from sleep, about to face another day of accosting and insulting strangers. He hates people but needs them, too. His voice-over kicks in, a peroration that opens with a bid for camaraderie (“Remember when we were kids and…
Shirley MacLaine has been described by press and co-stars over the years as “rude,” “nasty,” “difficult” and “selfish.” Hell, she’s called herself impatient, caustic and much worse. None of that has stopped her from being a fiery mainstay in American screwball comedies and dramas. Her signature pixie cut came to…
Almost no one ever asks young women what they desire — in movies or reality. Feminine cravings are still seen as a dire threat, a grand disturbance to the power structure, and the few movie men who dare speak the words “What do you want?” — like Noah in The…
In 1976’s The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin makes a crucial verb distinction when discussing the screen legends, like Bette Davis, with whom he was transfixed (sometimes uneasily so) in his youth: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” When one goes to…
To understand how Ritesh Batra’s The Sense of an Ending might disappoint you if you’ve read the suspenseful, tear-jerking Julian Barnes novel on which it’s based, you should think back to Batra’s much-lauded debut feature The Lunchbox (2013). In that humanistic film, a young woman trapped in her marriage falls…
