Those who remember Javier Bardem as the heartthrob poet from Before Night Falls, or the distinguished detective in The Dancer Upstairs, may be shocked to find that in his latest film to reach these shores, Mondays in the Sun, the Latin hunk is balding, bearded, and fat. Admittedly, he may…
From the lofty American vantage point, Mexico’s New Wave filmmakers have materialized like magic, the unexpected fruit of a renaissance that even many cinematically alert Yanquis hardly took the trouble to notice. Meanwhile these new directors have fashioned a vivid style that combines, in various proportions, Latin American literary experimentation,…
There’s magic in Northfork — both in the movie, by twin brothers Mark and Michael Polish, and in the Montana town soon to be drowned by the opening of the dam keeping the baptismal waters at bay. Northfork is a beguiling and bittersweet fantasy set in a netherworld where the…
“I went out to protest the traitors to the Revolution. Little did I know I was about to become one of them.” Juan Carlos Zaldivar’s words foreshadow the series of contradictions raised in his documentary 90 Miles. As a thirteen-year-old Cuban boy from the small town of Holguin, Zaldivar was…
If, in keeping with current fads, you seek movies featuring females kicking a bunch of ass, your appetite will be tended (and cultivated) at the multiplex all summer long. Wander into your local art-house, however, and you may find a fine if somewhat challenging import called The Legend of Suriyothai…
There’s something to be said for a movie that’s honest enough to transcribe dialogue that must have emanated from the director’s mouth, and make it part of the script. “Everybody start shooting at somebody!” yells Det. Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) in the midst of a particular situation. Earlier, he gives…
So much for those crackpot theories about flighty teenagers and their short attention spans. For four long years now the bland pop star Mandy Moore has stuck in the brain pan of white adolescent America like a wad of bubblegum, and there’s no sign that she will loosen her grip…
Those quirky kids over at the Florida Moving Image Archive are at it again, throwing the third annual film and video festival that highlights their amazing stash of archival footage. Never call this festival staid. It’s always bubbling with the unexpected, from the serious to the comically frivolous. This year…
There is one truly striking shock in the new made-in-Hong-Kong-by-Thai-directors horror flick The Eye, but unfortunately, directors Danny and Oxide Pang saved the best for first. If the film’s opening moments don’t grab you, nothing will; the Pang Brothers cut their teeth on commercials, and the first few minutes play…
What is it with women, anyway? They want to be safe walking the streets at night; they want to be able to trust strangers; they want the world to be beautiful, free, and wild. Are they nuts? Before you click SEND with the hate-mail (or, worse, with the “You said…
An Academy Award winner for Best Foreign-Language Film and winner of five Golden Lola Awards (the German Oscars), Nowhere in Africa recounts the true story of a Jewish family who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in Kenya. Although beautifully shot and acted, the film is hampered by…
I purposely avoided reading anything about Capturing the Friedmans till seeing the film, which has been no easy task. Andrew Jarecki’s documentary, about a Great Neck, New York family torn asunder in the late 1980s by allegations of kiddie-porn possession and the horrific sexual abuse of numerous children, has been…
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and it’s all PETA’s fault. Oh, we humored those wacky vegan extremists when they threw paint at rich bitches in hideously overpriced fur coats. We laughed when they’d come on conservative talk radio shows every Thanksgiving to get mocked for…
Once in a while a film comes along that is as sound, smart, sweet, and significant as can be, and Whale Rider is such a film. Fault the project on various counts if you like (I’ll try), but ultimately the tale is beyond reproach, a bane to cynics and a…
The hero of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen is an isolated teenager mired in a gray Scottish slum with only a vague dream of family life to sustain him. Like previous Loach heroes — the impoverished boy who finds hope training a falcon in Kes, say, or the downtrodden working stiff…
The number of boring, uninspired studio pictures hitting today’s multiplexes is getting depressing. To add insult to injury, many of these mind-numbing creations come from formerly — and presumably still — talented writers, directors, and actors. Last week saw Hollywood Homicide, a tired — and what’s, worse, lazy — buddy-buddy/cop/action…
No matter on which side of the border you sit, it’s a bit uncomfortable to hear the small mustachioed Mexicano in Herod’s Law tell the tall gringo, “Don’t worry, we Mexicans are men of our word.” As any fan of old Westerns knows, the lying, scheming Mexican is as much…
The emotional, even healing, power of music is only one of the themes that interests acclaimed Chinese director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon) in his beautiful new film, Together. Other, equally important concerns include father-son relationships and the way China, in its headlong pursuit of modernization, is abandoning…
Talk about your insanely ambitious projects: Filmmaker Jacques Perrin got it in his head to record, on film, the many varieties of annual migration to be found in the avian world. Animal actors in general are tough enough, but birds in particular are recalcitrant and skittish subjects, particularly when they’re…
French putz Xavier (Romain Duris) is depressed. The poor guy lives in Paris, has Amélie’s Audrey Tautou as a girlfriend, eats gourmet vegan dinners prepared for him by his free-spirited mother, and is being set up for a graduate degree in economics by a friend of his father’s. “I don’t…
For the seventh year in a row, Miami gets to be the first to view the latest crop of homegrown films from Latin America’s biggest nation during the Brazilian Film Festival. Starting on June 4, a coupling of shorts and features will take over the Lincoln Theatre (541 Lincoln Rd.,…
If you’re reading this paper, chances are you’re more literate than the average American. If you’re reading the film reviews, it’s also likely that you’ve become familiar with words like “bravura” and “eponymous,” which seem to exist only in the vocabularies of professional movie assessors. But what if you were…
