Some of the best love songs are those whose lyrics perch precariously between “I adore you, let’s be happy forever” and “I’m miserable without you, where have you gone?” Together, the melody and words of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash’s 1943 ballad “Speak Low” take the shape of a vaporous…
BoJack Horseman lurched out of the gate last year with a whole lotta animal puns and one uncomplicated thesis: Old sitcoms suck. An aggressively stupid and mawkish show from the late Eighties called Horsin’ Around, about an equine-human hybrid in Cosby sweaters who adopts three adorable orphans, made its star,…
When it comes to film and television, there are few current shows out there that Miamians can be proud to own. Sure, there’s Jane the Virgin that takes place in Miami, but the show isn’t filmed here and its version of Miami is sometimes laughable (though we love it anyway)…
There’s probably only one humanist film that opens with the words “Merry Christmas Eve, bitch!” accompanied by the proffering of a single, sprinkle-dusted doughnut. In Sean Baker’s Tangerine, best friends, transgender women, and prostitutes Sin-Dee and Alexandra (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) catch up at a doughnut joint on…
At 53, Tom Cruise is past the retirement age of every James Bond except Roger Moore. Yet not only does his 19-year-old Mission: Impossible series tick on, counting down the seconds till its next explosion, but Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is also determined to unman his cross-Atlantic competition. Forget high-tech gadgets…
How much time would you like to spend in the company of benignly kooky hobbyists? That’s the question to ask before committing to docu-commercial A Lego Brickumentary, a largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad. The film’s central conceit is sound enough: Lego construction kits “unlock [users’] imagination,” in…
The pizza joint Shakey’s in Hollywood is packed when transgender actresses Mya Taylor and Kiki Rodriguez slide into a booth with their director Sean Baker, whose shot-on-location-and-on-iPhone comedy Tangerine was the most talked-about surprise of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Taylor, the quieter and more glamorously aloof of the pair…
World cinema may have no better builder of delightful scenes than Roy Andersson, the deadpan Swedish existentialist. Each shot in an Andersson film is part diorama, part theatrical performance, part moviemaking the way Thomas Edison did it: Build a set, plant a camera, and stage highly orchestrated comedy and tragedy…
At the start of Woody Allen’s campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that has already steeled itself for his arrival. “Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me,” Abe admits. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director,…
It’s been 32 years since the release of National Lampoon’s Vacation, in which Chevy Chase, as dad Clark Griswold, packed his Griswold clan into what looked like a Country Squire from Hell and sought the family-bonding experienceTM by driving cross-country to a mythical mega — amusement park known as Walley…
Here’s a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special. That’s his ecological niche: the Manic Potbellied Dream Dork, or, if you prefer, the fragile Sand-Man.
HBO has renewed Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Miami based football comedy Ballers for a second season, which means so much more Miami. Ballers is like if you wrote the word Miami on a piece of paper, covered it with glue, then poured an entire bottle of glitter on it — it’s incredibly…
The opening of Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, shot in gritty, grayed-out tones, is a grim harbinger: A fighter getting ready for the ring holds up his meaty paws for the ritualistic wrapping of gauze and tape. His gloves are slipped over the wrappings, and then they’re taped on too — but…
“Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” Stephen Dedalus declared in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the case of Jimmy Gralton, she took bites and spat him out a couple of times. It’s tempting to say some people never learn, but, as played…
A reality show based on car restoration might not seem like the most groundbreaking idea you’ve ever heard, but Discovery’s new show Cuban Chrome represents so much more than that. The new series follows the A Lo Cubano Car Club, a group of antique car enthusiasts who were granted unprecedented access to film on…
The problem with clamoring for more woman-led comedies is that actual comedy may be the thing that ends up being left by the wayside. Tina Fey, among others, has railed against the boneheaded dictum that women can’t be funny. But in the current climate of watchfulness — one in which…
If you were to hear there’s a new street-crime revenge thriller that pairs a grown-up recent Oscar nominee/beloved TV star with Jennifer Lopez, you would probably respond, “This must be January” and “Even if it’s terrible, that movie will make serious money.” But the lead this time is not Liam…
It’s heartbreaking that, in his last dramatic film, Robin Williams plays depressed and repressed, burdened by secrets, a man incapable of connecting. In Boulevard, Williams invests himself in the role of a closeted Nashville bank manager married to a woman for whom he feels only sexless affection. Clearly, the actor…
We may not need another hero, but true believers don’t need to shrink-ray their expectations. Ant-Man is the first Marvel film — and the first of this summer’s pixels-go-kablooey time-wasters — to get better as it goes. The filmmakers save their biggest, wiggiest ideas for the climaxes, where they wittily…
Above all else, a movie built around a star promises presence, and in Bill Condon’s Mr. Holmes, that promise is dual: Here are 104 minutes with the great Ian McKellen, for once not casting spells, controlling magnetism, or classing up script pages of expositional gobbledygook. It’s not his job, this…
New York has often been the setting for films about heroin addicts, with titles ranging from Shirley Clarke’s cinéma-vérité-tweaking The Connection (1961) to Slava Tsukerman’s new-wave cult classic Liquid Sky (1982) mining the drama of smack freaks tying off, shooting up, and nodding out. But Josh and Benny Safdie’s tough,…
Children’s programming is about to get a little friendlier. Los Angeles-based and Miami-bred art collaborative Friendswithyou recently announced a partnership with Netflix to produce and air at least two seasons of a characteristically bright, colorful, and smiley-faced kids show. According to an interview with artnet News, True and the Rainbow…
