The Muppets doesn’t work, exactly, but I’m still watching. As a relative outsider to the 60-year Muppets franchise, I’ve long suspected that early imprinting is the key to loving Jim Henson’s gaudy, unblinking rags. I’ve never felt a particular need to watch pieces of felt tell Borscht Belt–style jokes, and…
Because women are particularly beguiling when viewed from behind, the camera loves to follow them: Anyone who’s watched James Stewart’s lovesick detective trailing Kim Novak, a platinum dream poured into a pale-gray flannel hourglass, understands the voyeurism at the heart of Vertigo. With Spectre — the 24th James Bond picture…
Political drama has long been shaped by what we can call the conversion narrative. In a play such as 1938’s One Third of a Nation, an everyman Joe you just gotta root for tries to live life honestly, outside of politics, only to find such living impossible: The system is…
Yes, it’s 3D computer animation, and yes, it shows us more of the face of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl than you ever thought you would see. But the news, for the most part, is good: The Peanuts Movie is much closer in spirit to Charles Schulz’s half-century comic-strip masterpiece…
Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke’s cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate. But then Collette, playing a vain patient bereft at losing her hair and her ability to wear seven-inch…
Comedy isn’t the champagne of bottled beers; it’s champagne, period, a delicate and perfect achievement in itself when it works. That’s why it’s frustrating when great comic performers feel compelled to prove themselves in what we so solemnly call dramatic roles. The late, scarily brilliant Robin Williams stumbled into love-me…
Through the ornate fonts, tints, intertitles, scores, acting techniques, and camera tricks that have made his “directed by” credit the ultimate redundancy, Guy Maddin demonstrates in The Forbidden Room that he has forgotten more about silent movies and early talkies than almost anyone else will ever know. And it’s the…
In celebration of Halloween, the Secret Celluloid Society planned an evening full of movies picked with the plan to keep you up all night. Starting at 11:30 p.m. at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, The Thing was up first, followed by Night of the Demons, Eraserhead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre —…
Back in 2011, a small film made with a group of Miami talent premiered at the 28th annual Miami International Film Festival, and now, years later, Magic City Memoirs is making its debut on Netflix. Due to some legal issues, director and writer Aaron Salgado couldn’t go into details on the…
Before Anthony Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential in 2000, mere mortals who simply eat in restaurants had little idea about the drinking, debauchery, and drug use rampant among the folks responsible for getting their fettuccine alfredo to the table. The book was eye-opening if true and a rambunctious, vicarious pleasure even…
David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy. Watching Sandra Bullock, as ruthless campaign manager Jane, flog her uncharismatic candidate for Bolivia’s next president, I snickered at her knowing quips. Asked by an offscreen TV interviewer (the film’s awkward framing device) to…
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin is the Taiwanese director’s first foray into the martial-arts genre. It may also be his most resplendent film yet: Watching it is like floating along on a sumptuous gold-and-lacquer cloud. Hou favorite Shu Qi (who also starred in Millennium Mambo and Three Times) plays Nie Yinniang,…
Completing a trifecta of recent cinema (after Masters of Sex and The Stanford Prison Experiment) suddenly fascinated with the social-science lab experiments of the Eisenhower-Nixon era, Experimenter is as cool as a grad student clamping electrodes onto a test monkey. One of our lowest-profile indie-film treasures, director Michael Almereyda never…
Lenny Abrahamson’s shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism. Seven years ago, a man (Sean Bridgers) snatched 17-year-old Joy (Brie Larson) and stashed her in his backyard shed. Two years later, she bore their son. The door stayed locked. Now 5, Jack…
The most effective scene in James Vanderbilt’s brisk, outraged Truth is one that will be familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a room where editors and reporters are breaking down an investigative story. The reporters — here, 60 Minutes researchers played by Dennis Quaid, Elisabeth Moss, and Topher…
Here’s a hair-raising assignment: Imagine you’re tasked with capturing the social and psychological complexities of a nation’s crackup within the framework of popular moviemaking. What if Gone With the Wind had tried, in its swooning romance, to explicate Scarlett O’Hara’s slow-to-dawn realization of the hopeless immorality of the world she…
This Jem is less a movie than an open-source brand launch: If you’re young and down or bullied or disconnected from the life around you, you could always slap on some glitter and film yourself singing as the cartoon-rock queen Jem. Aubrey Peeples, playing the singer, even gets a sort…
Sure, you can blame the aliens, the gophers, the monkeys and the fridge. But even without all those, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Harrumphing of the Whatsit likely wouldn’t have worked. Its director, you see, no longer finds it edifying to dream up new ways to kill America’s historical enemies…
Despite the versatility of his subjects, documentary filmmaker Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt acknowledges there’s a common thread throughout each of his films. “My films explore compelling characters presented in an observational style. I’m interested in unraveling an event as it’s happening, as a character is going for something they really want.” Perlmutt’s…
It has been eight years since Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s last movie, The Flight of the Red Balloon. Though that film was told through the perspective of a Chinese student living in Paris, his return to filmmaking couldn’t be more heavily rooted in Chinese culture with an intimate wuxia story…
Acting as a preview to the yearly Miami International Film Festival put on by Miami Dade College being held in March 2016, GEMS boasts a small collection of films screening at the Tower Theater daily starting today through Sunday. Compared to last year’s MIFFecito mini-fest, things look promising. The lineup,…
In his 2014 book Difficult Men, journalist Brett Martin identifies bad-boy antiheroes as the defining feature of our current “Golden Age” of television. Tony Soprano, Don Draper and The Wire’s Omar Little dazzle with their multifaceted complexity: How deep the furrow in Tony’s troubled brow! How pensive the trail of…
