In 1985, Lupe Ontiveros played Rosalita, a clueless housekeeper who’s the butt of jokes made by 13-year-old Corey Feldman in The Goonies. In 1997, she played another housekeeper, who gets a door slammed in her face by Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. In her later years, she…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That’s particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends…
The uttering of the name Tony Nathan strikes a chord in most all Miami Dolphins fans; after all, the former all-pro Dolphins starting running back in Super Bowl XVII and Super Bowl XIX will forever go down as one of the greatest players in franchise history. However, what might not come…
Who saw this coming? The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan’s witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an 11th feature, is its writer-director’s best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it’s the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what’s-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan’s basement-wandering simulator,…
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a television crime drama is being filmed in Miami. I know, groundbreaking stuff. Fox debuts Rosewood September 23rd at 8 p.m., the newest version of a who-done-it placed with a backdrop of beautiful Miami. Rosewood is based on the main character Dr. Beaumont Rosewood, Jr. (Morris Chestnut) —…
It’s a perfect summer afternoon in Los Angeles, and Lily Tomlin wants to do everything: drive to Neptune’s Net in Malibu, explore the L.A. River, tour Koreatown, grab cocktails in West Hollywood. She jumps in her 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer — her other car, a Prius, balances out its ecological…
Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you…
There’s steady, scary thrill in the final third of Meru, the latest attempt to conquer the climb-and-tweak-the-nose-of-God mountaineering documentary, a genre that has yet to reach its apex. The terrible beauty of the Shark’s Fin point of northern India’s Mount Meru is enough to make this worth seeking out on…
Claude Sautet is the finest French filmmaker you’ve probably never heard of, a discerning craftsman who began his career in the late 1950s only to be swept aside by the unstoppable New Wave. Sautet was simply never a Nouvelle Vague type: He began his career as a screenwriter — he…
Knowing full-well that Miami can never get enough films, The Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) brings back their Fall film event with a make-over of sorts, and it’s a damn good one. GEMS offers up fourteen feature films exclusively at MDC’s Tower Theater Miami, among other events, to satiate filmgoers…
There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…
Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city-dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks to the country to spend a week with her best friend,…
A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia to Maine, accompanied by an…
The first famous tennis player was King Louis X of France. Nicknamed Louis the Quarreler for his domestic politics, meaning he was likely a real pain to the ref, King Louis is renowned for two facts in athletic lore: He invented the indoor tennis court, and, after a hard, hot…
There’s a lot to laugh at in Daniel Lee’s faux-historical Silk Road adventure Dragon Blade, not least of which is the sight of Adrien Brody as corrupt Roman consul Tiberius wearing a tumble of raven-colored beauty-queen curls and purring in a phony British thespian’s accent. With his blue crushed-velvet cape…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor, and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
There’s a strain of science fiction writing that evokes a chilly kind of coziness, usually by introducing us to individuals or small groups of people who have found their way to the country in the hope of escaping encroaching doom. John Wyndham’s bleak, beautiful 1951 novel The Day of the…
This mean and vigorous men’s adventure pulp throwback has everything going against it. It’s a late-August release whose leads, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, tend to be the best things in movies you otherwise regret seeing. The trailers, teasing the story of a toothsome American family hunted by peasant-rebels in…
Narcos, Netflix’s new drug-war docudrama, is nearly as ambitious as its central character, Pablo Escobar. Over the course of 10 dense, sprawling episodes, the series tells the 20-year history of the narcotrafficker’s rise and fall in relation to Colombia’s blood-soaked history and the U.S.’s escalating drug war, from Richard Nixon…
