The age of the riot grrrls entered like a screaming woman and exited like a cooing teen. The woman was Kathleen Hanna, the Bikini Kill frontwoman who kicked boys out of her mosh pits and insisted, “I’m not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody’s boot…
As awards season draws nearer and best-of-the-year lists keep rolling in, there’s only one thing left to do: get excited about what comes next. Here are 10 films you won’t want to miss in 2014. 1. Adieu au Language (Directed by Jean-Luc Godard) Jean-Luc Godard, master of the French Nouvelle…
I could write a Shakespearean sonnet about each film on my Top 10 of 2013, but we know we’re all here for the agreements and arguments. (Plus, have you tried writing about Joe Swanberg in iambic pentameter?) Ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin. The Act of Killing — The year’s best…
If you’re a person alive in this age, Ralph Fiennes has at some point probably made you hate him. As the Nazi Amon Goeth in 1993’s Schindler’s List, Fiennes embodied one of history’s great evils, somehow making being utterly detestable compelling. In Martin McDonagh’s riotous, under-regarded In Bruges, Fiennes spat…
Here’s where I write about how hard it is to draw up a 10-best list at the end of the year. Except it isn’t: I think of drawing up a list as an honor and a necessity, a way of putting 12 months of moviegoing into some sort of perspective…
In Spike Jonze’s new sci-fi romance, Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a divorcé who rebounds by falling in love with his smartphone. On a recent Wednesday, however, he’s a delinquent boyfriend, leaving his iPad abandoned on a chair in a Lebanese restaurant as he bounces off to the parking lot for…
The year 2013 hasn’t been the proudest for Florida, especially when it comes to issues of race. This is the year of George Zimmerman’s innocence. It’s the year Taylor Chapman harrassed a Dunkin Donuts employee using the n-word. It’s the year one Miami Dolphins player made headlines by using racist…
David Beckham’s not the only one who could bring soccer to Miami in 2014. The Miami International Film Festival announced today that its 2014 fest would premiere the movie Foosball, an animated film from Argentina by Oscar-winning director Juan José Campanella…
In 2013, love came in many forms: girl on zombie, boy on smartphone, and James Franco on — count ’em — two hot bikini babes at the same damn time. Sure, romantic comedies are as extinct as Oprah Winfrey’s chances of winning Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes, but…
Elves snore, it turns out. Their maidens make teensy-peen jokes and pine for the hottest of dwarfs. And Bilbo Baggins, so concerned about his doilies just three hours of screen time ago, now punches his sword right through the trachea of a goblin — and then looks rather proud of…
A lurching crawl through the moldering, candlelit passages of a pre-hygiene medieval meta-Europe, this new version of the Germanic legend from Russian cine-volcano Alexander Sokurov may be the freakiest gloss this deal-with-the-devil story’s ever gotten, down to the ghost-zombies and Icelandic geysers. Mostly shot in the oldest, filthiest castle alleys…
The humanist virtues of John Sayles are readily apparent in the first scenes of Go For Sisters, his low-key border-crossing roadtrip mystery. Straight off, the writer-director-novelist treats us to two knotty, compelling monologues, a pair of showstoppers in the first 10 minutes, each delivered by characters you don’t see in…
The late Paul Walker practiced the kind of manly American acting that often doesn’t look like acting at all. In movie after movie, many of them of the fast and/or furious variety, Walker performed the difficult trick of seeming to really be the apple-pie tough guys he played. In those…
Someday there will be a serious academic study on Tyler Perry, the battered and sexually abused child who legally changed his first name at 16 to distance himself from his estranged father and grew rich playing a caricature of his mother in pantyhose and a dress, like a sass-talking Norman…
For the fourth consecutive year, Miami will be represented at the Sundance Film Festival, arguably the nation’s most prestigious film event, by the filmmakers of the Borscht Corporation. Sundance announced its short film program yesterday, including Yearbook by Miami filmmaker Bernardo Britto. The five-minute animated short will mark Britto’s first…
2013 was a good year to be bad. This year’s best villains weren’t just goons with guns — although there were a few great examples of those. (Here’s looking at you, Sean Penn.) We also hissed at slave-owners, inventors, seducers, producers, and a couple amazing women who left an impression…
The big problem with pinup queen Bettie Page — maybe the only problem — is that her image inspires so many easy bromides about how she made sex seem fun and playful and how she’s a great role model for modern women who want to feel comfortable with their sexuality…
Blending cliché-prone genres — disease-of-the-week tearjerker, marital melodrama, musical — into an unwieldy but distinctive hybrid, Belgian director Felix van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown holds you even as it flies off the tracks. The Flemish-language film revolves around banjo player Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) and tattoo artist Elise (Veerle Baetens),…
Photo by Hilary Bronwyn Gayle – © 2012 – OB Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.Download this week’s Voice Film Club podcast before you get on the plane or maybe listen to it on your way to a restaurant where you’ll eat turkey and get a little drunk on red wine.”I…
Beekeepers in More Than Honey.This year saw its share of incredible documentaries, but in 2013 the stand-outs are films that help flesh out the way we see the world. Below are fifteen docs we suggest seeing, from the grisly to uplifting. Click on the name of the film to read…
Once upon a time — the 1980s — you could walk into a movie theater any day of the year, plop down a few bucks, and watch one man kick another man’s ass. Not every action flick was great, but most were good enough, the film equivalent of pizza. Back…
Some movies come barreling out of their caves like armies on the sociocultural warpath, self-consciously defining themselves as psychographic events, marking The Way Things Are Now and becoming part of history in the process. Given the ambition, we should embrace these rare explosions when they happen, even more so now…
