“There’s been a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won.” Those eight words uttered by La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz sent the internet — and much of the media-consuming world — into a tizzy. A nation watched in disbelief as the Moonlight team cautiously took the stage at the Academy Awards. But Patrick Decile, the 20-year-old Miami native who played Terrel, the film’s brutal antagonist, was not among them.
Somehow, MTV2, the channel that was launched 21 years ago to show all the music videos MTV wasn’t, has essentially turned into BET — or TV One or Centric or whatever black programming-filled channel you know about. The evidence is all there — before it jumped back to its original…
There’s more of a narrative in Song to Song than in Terrence Malick’s last two films, but that may not, at first, seem like a good thing. Pin Malick’s work down these days — tease a story or philosophy out of it – and you’re usually faced with something simple,…
The Miami Film Festival event Straight Out of Miami: Rakontur Previews New Work, which took place at Regal South Beach, began with the most pressing question of the night. Festival documentary programmer Thom Powers asked Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman: “What the fuck have you been doing?”
Consider, before you consider anything else about the sequel to Trainspotting, that the director of both films is an artist whose signal trait had been a seeming repulsion at the thought of ever going back to the well. Between the original and the new T2 (cheeky title, innit), Danny Boyle…
It’s the take as old as time. Yes, Beauty and the Beast’s love story can be read as a tale of abuse and brainwashing, of a woman imprisoned by a tyrant until she starts chatting with the table settings — and then, as seasons pass, chastising herself in song for…
Sometimes failure leads to success. With the short film Scenes From Our Young Marriage, filmmaker Ronald Baez learned that lesson. What began as a feature production became a lengthy journey to create a short film that would screen at Borscht’s West Kendall International Film Festival and the Miami Film Festival this year.
Pop quiz. What comic-book adaptation centers on a white man orphaned by tragedy but blessed with great wealth who travels to an Asian country, only to return to America as a fearsome hero of amazing skill? That’s a trick question, of course: There are too many to count. In Batman…
It’s been awhile since New Times talked to Tatu Baby, AKA Katherine Flores, Miami’s bombshell tattoo artist and popular two-time contestant on Spike TV’s Ink Master in 2012 and 2013. This year, she’s back on TV, hanging out with Ceaser from VH1’s Black Ink Crew. Rumor has it sparks flew between Tatu Baby and…
With movie-history viewing choices spawning like mold in a damp room, we can easily see the things we didn’t even know we’d never seen. For me that includes Takashi Miike’s Black Society Trilogy (Arrow Video), a trio of quick, down-and-dirty crime-gang pulp rockets (1995-99) that established Miike as Japan’s fin-de-siècle…
In recent months, there have been serious calls for liberal city dwellers to reach beyond their “bubble” to better understand their rural counterparts. What’s rarely brought into the conversation: that large swathes of the so-called liberal elite have roots in rural places. These people, myself included, came of age among…
“Do not wait for permission,” film critic Rebecca Theodore-Vachon urged at this weekend’s Miami Film Festival. The Google Seminar Series on Gender & Racial Gaps in Film & Tech, which featured festival programmer Kiva Reardon moderating conversations with five women in the industry, emphasized that advice.
José María Cabral is a 28-year-old Dominican film director whose fifth movie, Carpinteros (Woodpeckers), will be screened at the Miami Film Festival this Friday, March 10. The feature, set in the Dominican Republic’s infamous Najayo prison, tells the story of two lovers forced by distance and incarceration to use sign language to communicate.
Gentle, humane, embracing a full range from slapstick to tragedy, Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy about the people of the Marseille waterfront has bewitched audiences for decades. Multiple remakes, including a Broadway musical, Hollywood condensations by James Whale in 1938 and Joshua Logan in 1961 and a recent “reboot” from French actor…
Let’s say you had to make up a list of historical moments that might serve as grand backdrops for sweeping, old-fashioned, Hollywood-style romantic dramas. How high would you rank the Armenian Genocide? How high would you rank any genocide? Watching Hotel Rwanda, you probably never hoped that, amid the carnage,…
“It’s been two years since we’ve released anything,” director Billy Corben says of himself and Rakontur producing partner Alfred Spellman. After a brief pause, he laughs and rhetorically asks, “It’s like, what the fuck do these guys do for a living?” Corben is reluctant to share what exactly he’s been…
Sometimes the mezzobrow film-culture deadlands of the 1980s looked like it was populated almost entirely by opal-eyed European children, spying on hayloft sex and weathering the neglect of peasant elders. That tame moment found its homogenizable directors, particularly Scandinavian teddy bears, imported to Hollywood. Such was the fate of Bille…
Not a soul in the world who has seen one of Rossy de Palma’s performances will be surprised to know that every ounce of energy and charisma the Spanish actress brings to her work is a part of her natural being. That fact was proven beautifully at Miami Film Festival’s riveting Saturday-night event, An Evening With Rossy de Palma.
With Borscht Diez having just ended and Miami Film Festival in full swing, Miami audiences have enjoyed a full roster of new films to check out. But what about the classics? March offers many.
The movies never get the Midwest right. When, onscreen, have you seen white people at the grocery store mouth that shy, apologetic “oop” noise every time someone walks close enough that they feel they must shift out of the way? Or a father lecturing his children about the greatness of…
For a movie in which a major character’s death is discovered when a giant lizard-monster vomits out his skull, Kong: Skull Island is a surprisingly breezy affair. It’s not so much that the characters or situations are particularly lighthearted. The film offers up plenty of wartime atmosphere and grim backstory,…
Science fiction has gotten so high and mighty on TV that it now can be easy to admire but hard to love. Westworld and Mr. Robot may win Emmys and prompt think-pieces, but their self-reflective chill keeps the audience at arm’s length — few things are as annoying as getting…
