There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were, like, just ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
Since 1963, the Austrian birthrate has halved. You can’t blame Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s new thriller, Goodnight Mommy, for the trend, but it sure isn’t helping. The quiet creepshow follows eleven-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz, great), who suspect their mom (Susanne Wuest) wishes they hadn’t…
“I specialize in Aaron Sorkin jokes. They never fail at parties,” says filmmaker Leslye Headland over the phone while discussing her pop culture jokes in Sleeping With Other People. After hearing the joke, audiences either laugh-out-loud or wonder, “‘Wait, Aaron Sorkin’s a crack addict?’ Everyone’s on his Wikipedia [after that and]…
The Coral Gables Art Cinema will host the U.S. premiere for the Venezuelan film The Longest Distance (La Distancia Mas Larga) this Friday with a red carpet event featuring the film’s director. The debut feature by 37-year-old writer and director Claudia Pinto presents a profoundly heavy subject with a restrained,…
“Cuba’s been sitting here for what, 55 years. Half an hour away, basically giving the biggest superpower in the world the stiff middle finger.” In the season six premiere of Anthony Bourdain’s award-winning travel show, Parts Unknown, the food-loving host travels 90 miles south of Miami to savor some of…
1. “He meant well,” a ticket-buyer said, shuffling miserably out of a Thursday-night screening of Roland Emmerich’s calamitous Stonewall. “That’s got to count for something.” I don’t think that’s true. If those good intentions had counted, they might have inspired Emmerich not to trust himself to helm this fictionalized recounting…
To witness Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is to witness another era entirely, a realm that, for better or worse, no longer exists. Long, dreamlike shots that trail through locations both gorgeous and destitute, offering up four short stories that were meant to depict Cuban life during the early years…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
In the mid-20th Century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
Producer Armando Christian Perez. It rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? Nah — we’ll stick to Pitbull. Fox has bought the rights to a Miami-based drama series titled 305 and decided that’s there’s nobody better to help produce the project than Mr. 305 himself. Fox has chosen Sascha Penn…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
Jumping right into conversation with Anna Muylaert, whose latest film Que Horas Ela Volta (The Second Mother) is making waves worldwide and was just picked as Brazil’s Foreign Oscar submission, was as easy as pie. With her film playing the Brazilian Film Festival of Miami earlier this month and opening…
The most recently eligible batch of 2014 ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries included Miami-based studio Rakontur’s Billy Corben directed The U Part 2, won the Emmy for Most Outstanding Sports Documentary Series this past week. Corben’s “The U Part 2” picked up where his original 2009 film about the University of…
The title The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution might seem tragic. Stanley Nelson’s welcome doc banners the Black Panthers as the “vanguard” of the revolution, a claim that’s true according to the Panthers’ own terms. The leather-jacketed crew carrying rifles onto the floor of the California state assembly in…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer/director Nancy Meyers’ The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
It can’t end like that, can it? Yury Bykov’s impressively bleak drama of bureaucracy, expedience, and the expendability of the poor seems to surge toward a finale that is both inevitable and impossible. The story, gutsy and wrenching, concerns a Russian plumber who susses out that a housing project in…
With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
Feminism in Hollywood is the newest case du jour. Everyone’s talking about it and young actresses are taking stands against the lack of representation and treatment of women in Hollywood. Just look at Emma Watson with her successful He for She campaign, and even teenager, and Girl Meets World star, Rowan…
It’s been some time now since David Oyelowo was nominated for a number of awards for his performance as Martin Luther King Jr.–- and snubbed at the Oscars — but the actor shows no signs of stopping. Last year, alongside Selma, he was featured in films like A Most Violent…
