In the past year, actor Hector Medina has starred in two of Cuba’s biggest international co-productions. He played Yunisleidi, the transgender love interest in the controversial El Rey de la Habana. And now, he stars as Jesus in Viva, which opens in Miami theaters tomorrow. In Viva, Medina plays a young hairdresser…
With the MiFo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in town, there’s an abundance of options for audiences to check out some queer films. This could be your only chance — otherwise, you’ll have to wait months and hope for a theatrical or online release. Halfway through the festival, there are…
Fairy tales were meant to be oral stories. Translating the tangents of old women in far-flung villages (whose chips on their shoulders about, say, their brother’s failed shipping business might inspire long asides about the shipping industry) into written texts doesn’t always make for the most linear, easy read. In…
Actor Jesse Eisenberg is known as a jittery person who speaks with a nervous stammer punctuated by “um”s and “uh”s. That characteristic is in full effect when he apologizes for calling a New Times reporter eight minutes past the scheduled time. The Oscar nominee says that after five months of…
Last week, the film The Sun Like a Big Dark Animal (El Sol Como un Gran Animal Oscuro) – directed by Miami-based filmmakers Christina Felisgrau and Ronnie Rivera (together known as Bleeding Palm) – made its online debut. Produced by the Miami-based Borscht Corp., the short had its world premiere at the 2015…
The lure of everything Cuba is strong. It’s in the news, on top of everyone’s travel list and in our movie theaters. But the recent films about Cuba aren’t exports from the still-embargoed country. Most come from visiting filmmakers. Irish director Paddy Breathnach captures a gorgeous portrait of Cuba with…
A fractured film about a fractured family, Louder Than Bombs takes a potentially tired premise and reshapes it before our eyes. It opens on a newborn’s tiny hand helplessly clinging to a father’s finger, and ends with a different father watching his two sons sleep. In between is a story…
Score one for going home again. After misfiring with Begin Again, a film that asked us to worry over a disillusioned A&R man’s efforts to coax a folk-pop album out of Keira Knightley, writer-director John Carney has turned back to the striving Irish of Once, his breakout hit. He’s also…
Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way. The premise will make some cringe, while making others giddy: A punk band, trapped in a club in the middle of nowhere, have to fight off a bunch of murderous skinheads to get…
The second season of Amazon’s Catastrophe might do for the #TGIF-style family sitcom of the late ‘80s and ‘90s what the first did for the ailing rom-com: open-mouthed resuscitation on the operating table after one too many Garry Marshall–fueled heart attacks like Valentine’s Day. (Or New Year’s Eve? It doesn’t…
In ’81 he accessorized his trench coat with high heels and bikini briefs. In ’84 that coat got dandified, high-collared and famously purple, Edwardian formalwear over a frilled tuxedo shirt over that wicked slick of chest hair. It was the get-up of a perv or a president, a look that…
Jonathan Pine, the hero of The Night Manager, might have a syrupy voice and skin tanned to a glowing bronze, but in other respects he’s a classic John le Carré creation. Pine (Tom Hiddleston) makes his living unshowily and in the dark, at a swank hotel, juggling front-desk phone calls,…
The time has finally come. Game of Thrones season six premieres this Sunday and we literally can’t even. We are without the ability to deal. We are so delirious it has us fantasizing and contemplating what Westeros would be like in an alternate universe. One where HBO decided to cast a bunch…
Elvis Presley once watched Dr. Strangelove three times in one night at a Memphis movie theater. After that, he made them play the last reel several more times, marveling at it. It’s fascinating to wonder about: Here’s this country’s biggest musical star, the leading man in movies he knew were…
Don’t hold it against Tom Tykwer’s A Hologram for the King that its best scene is also its first. As Alan Clay (Tom Hanks) strides down a suburban street singing a modified version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (“You may find yourself … without a beautiful house ……
It’s time for every cinephile who wants a heavy dose of queer cinema in their lives to get excited: The MiFo (Miami/Fort Lauderdale) LGBT Film Festival is hitting the city this month. Formerly the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival (MGLFF) is now split into two editions — one here…
Hey, yo. It’s 4/20. Know what that means? It means a whole day celebrating the gloriousness that is weed. And part of that celebrating includes three things: smoking, eating, and watching movies. Every year, you’ll see lists that tell you what the best movies to watch while high. Those will…
Each act in Mountains May Depart, Zhangke Jia’s latest disquisition on China in the 21st Century, takes place in a different time period with a steadily escalating aspect ratio: 1999 in 1.33:1, 2014 in 1.85:1, and 2025 in 2.35:1. As time moves forward, the possibilities expand in kind, with the…
Careful what you wish for. When it was announced that Jessica Chastain and Emily Blunt would be joining Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth for the followup to 2012’s humdrum action/fairy tale Snow White and the Huntsman, many filmgoers, myself included, got unduly excited. The original film, while a hit, had…
North Miami-born-and-raised writer/director Kelly Reichardt is a well-respected indie filmmaker. More than 20 years after she debuted her first film at Sundance Film Festival in 1994, River of Grass has been restored and re-released. For three nights only, it will screen at the Miami Beach Cinematheque beginning Wednesday, April 20. The…
The musician biopic might be stale and stupid as a genre, but it will endure. Each new one offers the possibility of the wondrous thing that made Hollywood into Hollywood: presence. You can guess from the trailers that I Saw the Light might be a botch job as drama, but…
Deep into her earnest, uncertain Nina Simone drama Nina, writer-director Cynthia Mort at last musters up a sequence of gravity and power. The inimitable Miss Simone — imitated here by Zoe Saldana — reads a letter from a woman who has recently lost her mother, a great Simone fan. It’s…
