Spielberg premieres Oct. 7 on HBO. While the studios accuse critics and Rotten Tomatoes of killing the movie business, Steven Spielberg is happy to look right into the camera and say that Pauline Kael had his number. “She was right,” says the world’s most profitable director deep into Spielberg, Susan…
The recipe for a perfect Christmas horror film — think the 1974 classic Black Christmas or 2010’s more arty, Finnish offering Rare Exports — calls for dark humor, at least one scene of bright red blood on snow, some kind of creepy Christmas toy or ornament, and a healthy dollop…
With its cast of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, its original non-franchise source material, its adult concerns and utter lack of superheroics, Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us stands as the kind of movie that grown-ups I know often say they wish the studios would make — and then tend…
The OUTshine Film Festival returns this year for its second edition, filling Fort Lauderdale theaters with dozens of queer features and shorts that demand to be seen. But if you’re having trouble choosing what to check out in queer cinema, fear not: New Times has these suggestions to guide you…
The story goes that the stretch of snowy landscape at the end of the original cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was actually B-roll from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, slapped on by Scott at the last minute to help deliver the more upbeat ending his studio requested. Those final moments…
Please accept what follows as a considered statement, arrived at through observation and experience, and not as film-review hype or boilerplate: Kate Mulleavy and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock is the rare drug movie that, as you watch it, if you surrender to it, stirs the sensations of having taken drugs. I’m…
It’s October, which means it’s time to retire from outdoor life and fully settle into the fall premiere schedule. And because it’s 2017, that means there are about a bazillion new and returning shows, so I sorted through the deluge to bring you the most intriguing ones. I swear, writing…
iIf there’s one thing the Japanese genre filmmakers whose work turns up at U.S. festivals tend to nail, it’s masterfully creating a sense of inescapable existentialist dread. At this year’s Fantastic Fest, two films bummed me out beautifully — a nice distraction from the ugly bum-out of the all the…
Out of the eighty-two feature films at Fantastic Fest this year, eleven were directed by women, and four of those were co-directed by a man. For the slow in math, that means women directed only about 13 percent, which is pretty dismal, though on par with Cannes and 8 percent…
One of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen on television comes early in The Langoliers, a 1995 ABC miniseries adapted by Tom Holland from a Stephen King novella. It’s the one about a small group of travelers waking up on a red-eye flight to discover that most of the…
Julia Solomonoff’s third feature finds the accomplished Argentine director in a naturalistic year-in-the-life mode, examining the somewhat aimless expatriate life of a Buenos Aires soap opera hunk in Brooklyn and Manhattan. As in her 2009 film, The Last Summer of La Boyita, Solomonoff here exhibits a scrupulous control of her…
When Jason Fitzroy Jeffers shows up for a late breakfast to discuss the second-annual Third Horizon Caribbean Film Festival in the wake of Hurricane Irma, he’s rocking some puffy bags under his eyes. It’s been a rough two weeks for the festival’s cofounder/director and his crew of collaborators — an…
Lording over the colonies is all bore and bother for the queen in Stephen Frears’ sumptuous yet centerless Victoria & Abdul. The film dramatizes Queen Victoria’s spirited friendship with Abdul Karim, a charming clerk from northern India who — in this telling — jolts the Empress of India from her…
In Battle of the Sexes, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ film rehashing the most infamous tennis match in modern history, Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) must brawl with the coed United States Tennis Association for equal pay as she comes to terms with her attraction to women and what might be…
Just a little more than three months ago, Tom Cruise starred in a lifeless wannabe-blockbuster called The Mummy that made little use of his innate charisma (shut up, he still has some) or his star persona, turning him into an anonymous action hero. Now comes American Made, a picture that…
BoJack Horseman streams on Netflix It’s not a huge surprise that my sensitive and kind-hearted spouse could be left sobbing by an episode of a popular TV show. She’d say herself that she’s an easy mark, TV showrunners. But it’s definitely a surprise when any show even tries. TV writers…
Mike White’s father-and-son college-trip comedy-drama Brad’s Status is legitimately more frightening than anything in It. Quite aside from the fact that real life is always scarier than monsters from the beyond, the writer-director’s deep understanding of envy, entitlement and embarrassment has never been more nightmarishly effective. But don’t expect one…
If it’s been too long since you’ve had a dose of the Miami Film Festival, there’s good news: GEMS is returning to satiate your filmgoing desires. Now in its third year, the 2017 edition of the fest will take place October 12 through 15 at Miami Dade College’s Tower Theater. And the full lineup has plenty to get you excited.
Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is so much movie that critics April Wolfe and Alan Scherstuhl have elected to sync up Pacific Rim-style to take it on. Warning: The discussion below delves right into what we might call spoilers if a movie like Mother! could be spoiled. Now let’s drift. April: Each…
The sequel to 2015’s hit Kingsman: The Secret Service won’t make you feel the urgent need to take a shower and/or throw up, like the original probably did. Believe it or not, that’s not always a good thing. Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Matthew Vaughn’s follow-up to his brutal, joyfully degenerate…
There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…
The documentary section of TIFF has a reputation for programming the types of films that can easily compete for audience attention with the narrative juggernauts, and this year is no different. From Agnes Varda’s wacky travelogue Faces Places to Frederick Wiseman’s ode to the New York Public Library Ex Libris,…
