Ask weary WWE viewers to identify why the professional-wrestling titan’s creative direction has gone so stagnant and you’ll hear one answer time and again: lack of competition. It’s no coincidence that the company’s late-‘90s heyday ran concurrent with the rise of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which at one point…
Thunderous, ponderous and occasionally exciting, Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opens with one of those grim proclamations that the creators of modern superhero movies are so fond of: “There was a time above, a time before,” intones the voice of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), over a by-now…
The joke was on me when I first saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002: I watched the film at a press screening that also happened to be attended by a large group of older female tourists. While I grimaced through the movie’s obvious gags and not-ready-for-prime-time direction,…
When everything’s a game, it’s easier to forget the wrongdoing perpetrated during play. We see this in sports, but we also see it in war, young men and women coping with stress by envisioning their targets as the bad guys in a first-person shooter. In Pablo Trapero’s bleak but occasionally…
Because 2015’s When Marnie Was There looks to be Studio Ghibli’s final new film for the foreseeable future, it makes sense that the studio would circle back around to its beginnings. Isao Takahata’s 1991 Only Yesterday was not Ghibli’s first feature, however; it was preceded by Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 Castle…
Here’s a minor miracle. From tiny Lighthouse Pictures, which specializes in Hallmark Channel originals with Christmas in the title, comes Bob Nelson’s The Confirmation, a bittersweet comedy about family, faith and a young boy saving up all his minor sins so he’ll have something to dish at confession. The surprise?…
Like the Juggernaut or St. Patrick’s Day drunks, nothing can stop the hundreds of hours of filmed superhero junk that hits our faceholes each year. But rest easy, true believer! Once in a while, the onslaught can still offer surprise and pleasure. A shiver of both hit me minutes into…
Take heart, Newsroom fans. If you were hankering for more scenes of Jeff Daniels standing around talking, you’ll find an unlikely ally in the new young-adult sci-fi sequel Allegiant, the third entry in the Divergent series based on Veronica Roth’s hit novels. Too bad the stuff he’s saying is so…
Prestige cable flatters us about the past. It lets us vacation in the backwardness of previous generations, usually while throwing some empathetic side-eye. Gape at Mad Men’s blithe white dudes, each convinced he earned every bit of authority he commands over women and minorities. Or thank Jezebel that we’ve evolved…
It was a long journey from Kendall to Iceland, Morocco, and Turkey before Miami native Juan Pablo Reyes could get his first producer credit for the movie Headlock. Starring Glee’s Dianna Agron and another Miami native, Andy Garcia, the film follows the story of a wife who tries to uncover…
For the protagonists of cable dramas, sex and death are twin forces of titillation, pressure valves for frustrated middle-aged men or steely-eyed careerists. That’s also true for the audience of cable dramas, of course, but there’s a reason we eagerly pursue onscreen what often makes us squirm in real life:…
The seemingly stark divide between sleep and wakefulness serves as the main motif in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor, which allegorizes the history of Thailand as deepest REM slumber. Weerasethakul’s works are sensory delights, haunted, if obliquely, by Thailand’s violent political past and still fractious present. A film about the…
This patchy comedy about a cossetted, obnoxious gymnast who has slid deep into sloth in the decade or so since her Olympic triumph gets an occasional laugh from the American ills it sends up: jingoism, the sports-industrial complex, home-schooling, fast-food gluttony. The scattershot jabs pepper the flaccid storyline of the…
Why is it that little movies about being out of step so often wind up feeling the same? Not long into Michael Showalter’s Hello, My Name Is Doris, a comedy about a misfit frump pining for a much younger hunk, the unlikely target of the heroine’s affections muses to his…
In 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot after attending a public rally. Rushed to the hospital, he died hours later. His assassin, Israeli ultranationalist Yigal Amir, is in prison for life, having achieved his goal: Without Rabin, the tentative Palestinian-Israeli peace process collapsed. Where’s the story in an…
On Friday night, the Miami International Film Festival premiered Dark Glasses, a film by a Cuban artist who is redefining the island’s cinema through esoteric visuals and an engrossing narrative. The future feels potent, accomplishing what contemporary cinema seems to have such a hard time at: cultivating authenticity. Jessica Rodriguez’s Pinar del…
It was no surprise to Colombian writer/director Ciro Guerra when his movie, Embrace of the Serpent, didn’t win an Oscar this year. When New Times spoke to him a few weeks prior about his nomination, he laughed and said, “Honestly, I have no idea how it works. I’m just very…
Through the course of history, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Sen. Jesse Helms have been linked. With the documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Inside Deep Throat) quickly get the connection out of the way in an opening montage…
Jia Zhangke is one of China’s great living filmmakers. A master of the ordinary, he delivers quality that never falters. After his rich and violent film A Touch of Sin, Zhangke returns with something more intimate, though no less critical of China’s social fabric. Mountains May Depart follows a woman’s…
The Brothers Grimsby is a movie for those who thought Kingsman: The Secret Service didn’t go far enough. If all the exploding heads and anal-sex jokes and creative impalements of Matthew Vaughn’s tongue-in-cheek spy thriller didn’t do it for you, rest assured: This time, we get to see British super-agent…
According to Jessica Rodriguez, she is is one of only four female directors on the entire island of Cuba. “It’s mind blowing to me that with such a rich filmmaking history, Cuban cinema still doesn’t have a place for female directors,” she says, collecting her long dark hair up in…
In one key way, the kinda-maybe sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane might be the purest example yet of the J.J. Abrams house style. Directed by first-timer Dan Trachtenberg but produced by Abrams (Super 8, Lost, Alias, Cloverfield, etc.) the thriller is yet another of the fannish wunderbrand’s mystery boxes, a genre…
