Saoirse Ronan makes a grand case for herself as the millennial generation’s finest leading lady in Brooklyn, an immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world. With an open, innocent countenance equally capable of registering tremulous separation anxiety, exhilarating joy,…
Bees are such tiny, seemingly inconsequential creatures, yet milligram for milligram, they affect the landscape in profound ways. You could say the same about small, delicate movies like Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Wonders, which tells the story of a hippie beekeeper family in the…
Bryan Cranston parades through Trumbo, a wiki-pageant of shorthand history, like he’s a costumed kid playing Actor Bryan Cranston at a Disney park. As blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a man given to mannered diction, Cranston layers movieland falseness over the scraped-raw heart of his Breaking Bad triumph. Remember how you…
There are movies that aren’t for everyone, and then there are movies that ought to be stamped with a “Caution: Not for Everyone” disclaimer. Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut, Metropolitan, is not only about rich teenagers — a common one-note villain in most American comedies. It’s also about old-money Manhattan teenagers…
The Nazis lost World War II, but they’ve conquered the American imagination. Seventy years after his suicide, Hitler is still everywhere: in the movies, on YouTube, in political headlines and on the History Channel. The latest manifestation of our Third Reich fixation is The Man in the High Castle, Amazon’s…
Marvel’s Jessica Jones is smart, surprising and occasionally terrifying, a human tale of trauma and healing in a superhero vein. Its first episodes have more (unexploitative) sex scenes than battles, more shrugs and eye rolls than mighty kapows. But it’s not the shock or novelty that gives it resonance. Jessica…
Although the history of the Cuban Revolution is a subject rarely found in schoolbooks, it’s a subject very familiar to the people of Miami. In one way or another, we’ve heard the stories of how a young Fidel Castro rose to power by overthrowing the unwanted Fulgencio Batista and most…
Theeb, a foreign-language film from Jordan, made its South Florida debut during Miami Dade College’s 32nd-annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) earlier this year. During the festival, the film took the screenwriting prize and left audiences — and critics — in awe. Told from the perspective of the nomadic eyes…
Films festivals are often a dime a dozen, with some cities pretty much boasting a fest for every subgenre and topic imaginable. But some aspire to a higher purpose, namely education, and Mountainfilm is one of those. Mountainfilm in Telluride is a 37 year old documentary film festival in Colorado,…
With the spectacular The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2, the best in the series, Jennifer Lawrence closes out the franchise that made her the biggest star of her generation. Since The Hunger Games began in 2012, she’s starred in four of them and only six of everything else. Luckily,…
How funny, really, are dick pics? Millions of them must be snapped and shared each year, as inducement or harassment, celebration or shaming. Perhaps Harper’s Index could tell us the tonnage of coal mined each year to power the transmission of American crotches. So when a dick pic turns up…
It’s clear why Angelina Jolie Pitt became a star. She was a sexpot with talent, and, just as crucially, her feline beauty was a sexpot breed we’d never seen. Past glamazons like Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, and Jayne Mansfield trailed a whiff of insecurity. We could sense they were wounded,…
We’ve gotten used to the idea that the highest-quality, most innovative television lives on premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime. But two of the most delightful and inventive series to premiere in the past year have come from an unexpected place: the CW. Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend…
Movies are great. But what makes enjoying movies extra special is when you’re able to lounge, have some food (in addition to just popcorn), and utterly forget the world around you. Sometimes, such a feeling is hard to accomplish in a movie theater, which is why so many people these…
If you live in Miami, there’s no doubt that you’ve noticed the effect of the Castro regime from just 90 miles away. Going on more than 50 years in power, the Castro dictatorship weighs particularly heavy on the generation that remembers the revolution as it happened. Return to Ithaca, a movie…
First things first: Yes, Gaspar Noé’s arthouse sexbomb, Love, quite literally goes off in your face, with an ejaculation closeup 90 minutes in that might have you wiping off your 3D glasses. You might think that’s an impressive provocation, until you recall that every 12-year-old boy in America sees that…
Newspapers are dead, except in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved them — which means there are still narrow slivers of hope. One of them now comes to us in the form of a movie: Tom McCarthy’s bold, shirtsleeve-sturdy newsroom drama Spotlight, which shows how a team of…
How do you dramatize the unthinkable? On August 5, 2010, 33 Chilean miners were trapped when the 100-year-old gold and copper mine in which they were working collapsed around them. For weeks, no one knew if they were alive or dead. But 69 days later, after a team of international…
The best of all heist movies, Jules Dassin’s tough-minded clockwork thriller Rififi, from 1955, is also one of the great films about process, about prepping for and grinding through small challenges, about improvisational teamwork within the framework of a plan, about the satisfaction of the last few cranks of a…
In its very first scene, Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series, Master of None, presents something never before seen on TV: an Asian-American male romantic lead at the center of his own series. Granted, that scene is hardly sexy: A broken condom puts the brakes on a bar hook-up between Dev…
After what can only be described as a totally jam-packed month of classic cinema in October, culminating in a night of way too many movies for anyone’s good, November slows it all down. Here are the goods, which this month will be conveniently split up by location due to the…
To say that Catherine Hardwicke has made a career out of balancing edge with emotion isn’t much of a stretch. Her films often mix authenticity with a sense of heightened reality and Miss You Already is no exception. In the first ten minutes of her latest feature, she and writer…
