“We won’t make the world a better place, but at least we won’t make it worse,” says Franciszek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop) to his younger brother, Józef (Maciej Stuhr), near the climax of Wladyslaw Pasikowski’s Aftermath. That stark cynicism permeates Pasikowski’s unsettling historical drama. The story is simple — two siblings…
Audaciously overcooked in its fussy grandeur and telegraphed plot twists, Cinema Paradiso writer/director Giuseppe Tornatore’s obsessive-quest drama strains toward being a thriller under Ennio Morricone’s strident score. Geoffrey Rush is on the money as hoity-toity art auctioneer Virgil Oldman, whose auction-block witticisms and Sherlock-worthy ability to deduce centuries-old forgeries impress…
While our ingenues scurry toward teen best sellers and David O. Russell flicks, here’s the next generation of talented leading men swaggering into a dude-bro Sex and the City. At night, best friends played by Zac Efron, Miles Teller, and Michael B. Jordan — aka the player, the goof, and…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, this paper’s film critics kick things off with something of a “potpourri segment,” to borrow a phrase from Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl. Echoing a common sentiment in the movie world, Scherstuhl describes the month of January as a “grim, featureless landscape…that long,…
It’s hard out there for a Miami Bravolebrity. The Magic City’s Real Housewives franchise is one the Bravo network’s newest, launched in 2011 as a rebranding of the failed series Miami Social, and ever since, it’s been struggling to achieve the same kind of viewership as more successful series, like…
With 30 years of festivals in its past, the Miami International Film Festival will mark the start of its fourth decade with some changes. It’s been a gradual growth process to bigger and better things since festival director Jaie Laplante took the helm of the festival in 2011. “Last year…
For Robert Redford, Sundance’s opening day was a bummer. He woke up to learn the Academy had snubbed him for a (deserved) Best Actor nod for the sparse yachting drama All Is Lost, and had to spend his typically triumphant morning press conference swatting down questions about being sad. Luckily…
Reality competition King of the Nerds returned to TBS last week for its second season premiere. Pitting 11 of the nerdiest minds against each other in battles of wits, fantasy, and a pinch of brawn, the competition aims to crown the ultimate nerd and give them $100,000. As the Miami…
Following in the footsteps of the much-anticipated Entourage movie and HBO’s Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson vehicle, Ballers, there’s another kid who wants to play in Miami’s muy caliente sandbox. FX Television’s Hoke, starring Paul Giamatti of Sideways fame, will soon film its pilot episode right here in South Florida. Chronicling…
There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…
Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…
The Sundance Institute announced its winners in short filmmaking at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and Miami filmmaker Bernardo Britto came away with a prize. Britto’s short film Yearbook won the Short Film Jury Award: Animation at the awards ceremony. See also: Borscht Filmmaker Bernardo Britto Accepted to Sundance 2014…
You can say this for the Disney teen machine: They sure know how to pick ’em. Vanessa Hudgens was 17 when High School Musical made her famous, the tail end of a generation of Mouseketeers that included her contemporaries Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus, and Selena Gomez, and her elders Justin…
There’s hunger, and then there’s hunger, and every kind of both fuels the desperate young Cuban men who scrap through this nervy, sensual feature. The first hunger is the obvious one: Good food, like almost everything a family needs, isn’t easy to come by in late-era Havana, so husband and…
Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men, so many of whom are encouraged to develop skills and interests having…
Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi solidifies his status as one of cinema’s finest living dramatists with The Past, a superb followup to 2011’s Oscar-winning A Separation that again situates audiences amid interpersonal, familial, and household crises. Working from a script that incisively plumbs a thicket of logistical and emotional complications, Farhadi’s…
The publicity campaign for Big Bad Wolves, a nasty little revenge thriller from Israeli filmmakers Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales, quotes Quentin Tarantino’s decree that it’s the “best film of the year.” Tarantino saw Big Bad Wolves at last year’s Busan Film Festival, where he reportedly showed up at a…
How did Wynwood become Wynwood? The former warehouse district has become a favorite cultural crucible of our city, a focal point of Miami that rivals or perhaps even supersedes South Beach in the minds of much of the country. But when did all of this start adding up to Wynwood…
The Sundance InstituteEvery Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film…
Pamela Smart, the sexpot schoolteacher who seduced three teenage boys to shoot her husband, has been imprisoned without parole since 1991. Her official release year is sometime in 9999, assuming that human civilization is still alive. Yet the captive in Jeremiah Zagar’s Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart isn’t her…
Even with the cosplay parties, technology seminars, and premieres of local and international sci-fi movies, the 2014 Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival couldn’t help but begin over the weekend on somewhat of a blue note. “When I was a kid, we were told there would be flying cars and…
© Courtesy of Sundance InstituteSixty years ago, Fred Flintstone hawked Winston cigarettes. Today, he pitches cereal. And both can kill. Stephanie Soechtig’s rabble-rousing documentary Fed Up argues that it’s time to attack Big Sugar just like we successfully demonized Big Tobacco. Narrated by Katie Couric, Fed Up is the first…
