Critics lampoon him as a fast/furious lug nut, a hunk of well-oiled meat who doesn’t so much act as ka-thunk his face and body through its limited gears. To hell with them. Vin Diesel may not run smoothly, but he runs with purpose and conviction, and any line of dialogue…
When he was a young boy, Stephen Bogart remembers fondly a trip he took with his father, Humphrey Bogart, on a boat around the Catalina Islands in California. Stephen had a small plush skunk toy he used to play with by putting inside a crab trap cage. One night, he…
On Tuesday night, the Miami Jewish Film Festival presented a sold-out screening of Rhonda Mitrani’s Cuba Mia at Temple Moses. The film, which documents the story of a group of Cuban-born U.S. Jews who return to the Cuba of their childhood to find it both familiar and changed, also included a…
Acting as a preview to the yearly film festival being held in March 2016, GEMS boasts a small collection of films screening at the Tower Theater daily starting Thursday through Sunday. “GEMS is the name we came up with to best represent the personality of our new fall festival event,”…
Quick! Name the movie in which Bill Murray plays a proudly shabby dude who acts like a prick for an hour and then, for reasons of narrative convention rather than character-based truth, shambles toward either heroism or some vague be-nicer enlightenment. Maybe a tougher challenge would be to name the…
A super naturalistic study in class, bureaucracy, and censorial stupidity, Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature, Court plants viewers in the plastic chairs of an Indian court of law as 69-year-old protest singer Narayan Kamble (Vira Sathidar) is tried for a crime he didn’t commit by lawyers and a judge speaking a…
New this year to the Revolt Music Conference was the addition of their first annual Revolt Film Festival. While the music portion took place at the Fontainebleau this weekend, the film festival screened its inaugural five shorts at the Lyric Theater in Overtown on Sunday. The festival was hosted by…
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a great movie, be it the horror that thrills you, the drama that moves you, or the romantic comedy that pretty much shapes the way you dream of falling in love. And it’s even more satisfying to occasionally get away from the big ol’…
Twenty-year-old Josh’s (Josh Thomas) world explodes twice in the Please Like Me pilot: first when he realizes he’s gay and again when his bipolar mother, Rose (Debra Lawrance), attempts suicide. Josh takes both revelations in stride, though he dreads having to inform his mom, whom he’ll be living with and…
It’s easy to say Miami is a weird city. Its reputation for freakishness is so well known, it seems to have been co-opted by cities like New York and Los Angeles. A shark on public transit? Miami had it first (and bigger). It doesn’t matter what L.A. says, Miami is the true capital…
Hopping off the set of season two of DirecTV’s original series, Kingdom, Natalie Martinez takes a break from filming in Los Angeles. The Miami native refers to the boxing series as a passion project and her voice gets noticeably giddier when she speaks about her work as Alicia Mendez. “It’s…
If you’re like me, a second generation Cuban-American, then you had (or have) a grandmother who grew up on the Caribbean island and one day was forced to leave everything behind in search for a more politically stable home. Life experiences like that tend to harden a person, and while…
After two successful years presenting retrospectives of Jewish filmmakers together, The Miami Jewish Film Festival and Miami Beach Cinematheque announce their 3rd annual Masters of Jewish Cinema series, featuring a retrospective celebrating Billy Wilder’s most iconic films. The series, charmingly titled Some Like It Wilder!, runs from October 14 through…
Mia Wasikowska is proof of reincarnation. The Australian actress must be possessed by the spirit of Lillian Gish. At 22 — the same age that Gish starred in Birth of a Nation — Wasikowska became a bankable name playing the lead in Tim Burton’s garish Alice in Wonderland. In the…
Aaron Sorkin opens a new desktop icon with Steve Jobs, a briskly busy, talkative companion piece to the Newsroom and Moneyball writer’s Mark Zuckerberg-centric The Social Network. Adapting Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple innovator — and covering much of the same ground as Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The…
Here’s a scary story for you. Somewhere in Hollywood, a cabal of producers are forever zombie-ing up the corpses of long-dead licensed properties, ever hopeful that you will continue to throw your money at familiar trademarked characters even as they eat your brains. Sometimes, when a silver moon shines just…
Steven Spielberg’s true-story Cold War procedural Bridge of Spies has a wintry chill. The colors are gray and green, the skin tones pale as frozen fish, and the film stock fuzzed and snowy. Our protagonist, James Donovan (Tom Hanks), spends half the movie waylaid by a cold and takes his…
Like the small bit of concrete foundation embedded in the brick sidewalk that pokes out in an awkward triangle from under the post office wall on the corner of Grand Avenue and McDonald Street, my memories of the Grove Cinema are slight. The physical evidence of the art house is…
Well, folks, a month of horror and cooler air approaches and, boy, is it a fun one for the classics. With the Halloween spirit all around the place, an abundance of horror hits Miami, but it’s not solely limited to that. Without further ado, here are the classic films showing…
Right up into the 1960s, the Hays Code demanded that criminals in American movies face punishment by the final reel, a stricture that, however well-intentioned, served to propagate our national myth: that the only route to success is hard work and decency. Crime still doesn’t pay, exactly, onscreen — the…
Jafar Panahi looks happier than he has in a while — and he’s getting out. That’s encouraging, and it doesn’t mean that his latest act of defiance, the film Taxi, isn’t bold. Once again creating cinema in spite of Iran’s 20-year edict forbidding him to do so, this most daring…
Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
