By now, the internet has offered plenty of images of actor Oscar Isaac as the omnipotent deity in the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse. But amid all the commotion surrounding the release and while the actor is filming Star Wars Episode VIII, the Miami native took time out of his busy schedule to…
What do you get when you make a superhero movie with a male lead but keep your female audience at the forefront in your decision-making? Apparently a box office hit. By now, you’ve probably heard about the wild success of the little superhero film that could: Deadpool. Nobody expected much…
Hardcore Henry screened as a midnight movie at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and was so ecstatically received that a distributor bidding war ensued. Six months later, the film has hit theaters nationwide and fallen flat, thanks to intensely negative reviews from critics upset by its unceasing violence. It didn’t…
The effortless charisma of Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, the headliners of the first two Barbershop movies (released in 2002 and 2004), helped keep those over-plotted comedies buoyant. Cube and Cedric are back as Calvin and Eddie in Barbershop: The Next Cut, but even their enormous appeal can’t rescue…
Here’s about as convincing an argument as I can imagine for the existence of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. Disney and Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book reinvigorates an oft-told tale with star power, technology and calculated charm. It’s been billed as a live-action remake (it’s too good to be called a…
Born and raised in Miami, actress Suki Lopez, age 26, has only ever known diversity and inclusion. Only hen she first moved away from home around four years ago did she start to experience life outside a sheltered bubble. She lived briefly in Los Angeles before settling in New York…
Here’s a question faced by the creators of almost every superhero adaptation: How do do you pull this off without copying Frank Miller’s Batman? Too many modern superhero dramas — including the Dark Knight films, Arrow, Daredevil and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — either ape the dour realism…
One day in 1994, residents of Little Havana and Downtown Miami heard a loud boom. It wasn’t a hurricane or a riot or anything dangerous. It was Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing some shit up with a big-ass, fake Harrier Jump Jet. True Lies, the action comedy about a secret agent that…
In Jeff Nichols’ gripping domestic thriller Take Shelter, Michael Shannon played a family man convinced that Armageddon was upon us. But even as the character’s visions compelled him to take more and more extreme precautions, the film remained fixed in the world of the real. It was a portrait of…
Clowning, bullet-riddled rom-com Mr. Right is awfully charming in the best and worse sense of the phrase. It’s often kind of awful but also weirdly, effervescently charming, a movie that salves, with its stars’ radiance and charisma, even as it grates. What hurts: lots of vaguely comic hitman drama, with…
Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! is being billed as a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 high school stoner classic Dazed and Confused, but in some key ways it feels closer to his animated 2001 philosophy bull session Waking Life — a freewheeling grab bag of ideas, ruminations and loose ends…
A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…
The Chet Baker portrayed by Ethan Hawke in Robert Budreau’s misty biopic Born to Be Blue is midway between beauty and ruin. Behind him are the 1950s, when his easy virtuosity and matinee-idol looks swiftly took Baker from Charlie Parker’s sideman to major player on Dick Bock’s Pacific Jazz label…
Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition presents an interesting experiment: What if you told a story of tragedy but withheld all the tenderness and emotion from it, so that you were left — at least until the very end — with just literal and figurative wreckage, disconnected fragments seeking to be put back…
There are a whole lot of classic films showing throughout Miami, which is pretty damn exciting. Here’s what to look forward to in the month of April: Cosford Cinema The Douglas Sirk retrospective that kicked off in March with All That Heaven Allows (and a film it inspired – Far From…
Superhero fans may not know stunt coordinator Philip J Silvera’s name, but they do know his work. Silvera’s choreography turned heads in such recent comic-book adaptations as the Arkham Knight and Arkham Origins Batman video games, the record-breaking Deadpool film and Netflix’s Daredevil. Silvera’s imaginative, brutal work on Daredevil’s first…
Some free advice: If you ever find yourself defensively reminding people that you’re not in a cult, you’re probably in a cult. This comes up early and often in The Path, Hulu’s new series premiering on March 30th, not that any adherents of the fictional Meyerist Movement seem fazed by…
Drone warfare is a moral grey area, and this movie is on it. Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky stands alongside Drones and Good Kill as the cinematic equivalent of online commenters shouting “First!” on on a hot topic but not bothering to say anything new or insightful about it…
Willful ignorance as a character trait typically evokes annoyance in those who witness it – at least in real life. In many French films, however, a character who’s willfully ignorant is portrayed in the twee manner, encouraging us to believe it is their blissful view of the world we should…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, intimate relations with Marion Cotillard lead one character to a spiritual awakening. Later, protagonist Paul Dédalus (Mathieu Amalric) declaims on what he considers “the one pleasure” that will never go away in life: “the surprise when I…
Have you ever considered the fact that, in 1951, Hank Williams actually wrote “Hey Good Lookin'”? That, for the first 175 years years of American history, those words and that melody weren’t already part of our shared heritage? Williams didn’t just pluck it out of the air, of course. Cole…
This weekend, protest organization Occupy Miami (a branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York) will host the inaugural Radical Film Festival. The two-day cinematic celebration of resistance aims to inform and inspire. Screening will be six topical films selected by local organizations, including Black Lives Matter Miami, Dream…
