A while back, a friend expressed concern that her son, a 10-year-old, was watching too much My Little Pony. “It’s sweet,” she said, “but not what I’d choose.” I asked what she would prefer that he watch. “Well, his dad started him on that new Star Wars cartoon.” That cartoon…
This year turned out to be a challenging one for couch potatoes. In 2015, the “more programming, more problems” state of television held just as true for viewers as it did for network executives; there was simply too much to watch. But this annum of Peak TV has delivered some…
How good was 2015 for movies? My first draft of a top ten was a staggering top 30. I had to make some agonizing cuts. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it: Watch every one by New Year’s Eve. OK, OK, at least by New Year’s Eve next year…
As we approach the end of another year in moviegoing — and as the industry prepares for its annual spasm of awards and accolades — it seems an apt time to look ahead. Here are ten films you won’t want to miss in 2016. 1. The Invitation (Dir. Karyn Kusama)…
No sentence distills the essence of one strain of cinephilia — mine especially — better than this one: “Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women.” Bracing in its profound simplicity, this line was written in 1983 by Boyd McDonald (1925–1993), author of the essential collection Cruising the…
What’s quietly revolutionary about Sisters is that it’s a dumb party movie like a million others. The hosts score booze, invite over dozens of friends and frenemies and then watch in horror – and a touch of self-congratulatory awe – as their house gets trashed. With the sunrise come lessons,…
The drawback was they had one Elvis,” an ex-girlfriend of Jimmy Ellis deadpans in Jeanie Finlay’s tragicomic doc Orion: The Man Who Would Be King. Ellis, an Alabama-born singer whose voice shared much of Elvis Presley’s timbre and husky power, had tried for years to hit the big time, touring…
When The Mindy Project debuted in 2012, one of its two main inspirations, the big-screen romantic comedy, was already dead. Kate Hudson’s last studio rom-com (Something Borrowed) was released the year before, Katherine Heigl’s (Life as We Know It) the year before that. With their Harry/Sally-esque slant-rhyming names, The Mindy…
To say that the films of David Lynch should be playing on a loop for the rest of eternity isn’t all that much of a stretch, considering the filmmaker is one of the most fascinating surreal figures of his time. And with a showing of Eraserhead just months ago, Miami…
With the Miami International Film Festival only months away, it’s time for some of the festival’s selection to hit the press. Although the festival’s 33rd edition will kick off on March 4, the opening night film has been selected: Álex de la Iglesia’s latest film, My Big Night (Mi Gran…
Nearly a year has gone since the last Miami Jewish Film Festival (MJFF), but now, the beloved festival is set to return in January for its 19th year with plenty of films to get excited about. The festival, which is the largest Jewish cultural event in Florida and the third…
When it comes to Miami indie film production, everyone knows Borscht Corp. has been on a roll. Yesterday, the Sundance Film Festival announced that it has accepted an unprecedented five films from the filmmaking collective to premiere at next month’s festival in Park City, Utah. Four short films and a…
North Miami Beach’s Intracoastal Mall has reached a new level of swanky with the addition of an iPic Theater. The Boca Raton-based theater chain recently opened its newest location on Friday, December 4, and invited a few members of the press to experience the luxury amenities first hand on Tuesday…
A disheartening case of When Auteurs Go Affected, Every Thing Will Be Fine confirms that Wim Wenders — making his first dramatic feature since 2008’s Palermo Shooting — is a filmmaker now light-years removed from his Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire heyday. Egregiously airless and artificial, Wenders’s latest (written…
Years after Moby-Dick was a flop, Herman Melville visited an old ship’s captain named George Pollard. Both men had seen better days. In their youth, both had sailed the seas with some success. Melville had written novels about his adventures with island girls, and Pollard had once helmed one of…
In the current noble vogue of admirable female figures in documentaries, now comes Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us, the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history —…
It’s beginning to look a lot like the holidays here in Miami, inside and out. Although it is still not particularly cold weather-wise, hopefully the theaters will crank the air to 30 and whip up a snowstorm during a film. December is here and so are a bundle of classic…
Yes, Janis Joplin made a hell of a record out of Rodgers & Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” but you’re right if you winced to learn that Amy Berg’s new documentary feature about Joplin, Little Girl Blue, takes that song as its title — and as its dismal argument and organizing…
Oh, Zeus, hear my lament that I was not present when Spike Lee imagined updating Lysistrata to present-day Chicago. I bet he burst himself cackling. Aristophanes’ 411 B.C. comedy, written during the three-decade Peloponnesian War, concocts a crazy scheme: Women refuse sex until their blue-balled men give in and declare…
In a 2001 interview, producer Lee Mendelson recalled the reaction of a CBS executive who attended a screening of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” shortly before it was scheduled to premiere, on December 9, 1965: “Well, it’s in the TV Guide logs — we gotta put it on the air. Nice…
The heads of the City Dionysia, the Grecian playwriting competition that pitted Aeschylus against Sophocles and can be considered the original Oscars, had a rule: no original characters. Instead, the best creative minds of a generation — or really, a millennium — exhausted themselves finding new spins on, say, Medea…
Maybe Cars and the Hot Wheels-ification of Pixar has been a good thing. Now that the storied studio has, like its rivals, puked onto our screens indifferent kid-distracting junk, its new movies come unfreighted from expectations of genius. Miserable as it was, Planes: Fire and Rescue (from corporate parent Disney…
