The first time we cry, as newborns, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: Our feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk or simply that we are heard.
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
No one recognized Rick Famuyiwa when he strolled up to the Ladera Park basketball courts on a bright weekday afternoon. In January, the lanky, 41-year-old director’s new comedy, Dope — a crowd-pleasing high school flick about nerds who dress like Kid ‘N Play, dream of going to Harvard and bash…
After a decade of TV work and a not-bad kids flick, director Joe Dante — like his ’03 Looney Tunes — is back in action. But instead of harking to the matinees that once inspired him, his zombie-girlfriend embarrassment Burying the Ex digs back into less promising territory: early seasons of Two and a Half Men…
By now, you must have seen Sunday night’s season five finale of Game of Thrones. And if you haven’t, you were either living under a rock or binge watching Orange is the New Black. (If it was the latter, you’re forgiven.) So if you’re not yet caught up with this…
Prison life is reliably repetitive, but conditions can be frighteningly unstable, too. Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which returns for its third season on June 12, reflects that paradoxical state of affairs by delivering more of the same — heartfelt but complicated relationships, inspired capers, compelling personalities, stomach-twisting flips…
In Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic Park reboot — set 22 years after dinosaurs began walking the Earth, again — brontosauruses, stegosauruses, and velociraptors have become old hat, sort of like the mechanical Abe Lincoln at Disney World. Meanwhile, the habitat around them has gone Vegas.
A New York judge has ordered that businessman Marc Schiller’s lawsuit over his portrayal in the movie Pain & Gain, which was originally filed in April 2014, must now be transferred from the Empire State to South Florida. The case will now be heard in a federal court in Miami…
“I hate myself.” That’s an unusual statement coming from the hero of an animated film, let alone in the first two minutes. But 12-year-old orphan Anna (Sara Takatsuki), the protagonist of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s lovely anime When Marnie Was There, has no illusions about her place in the world
A romance about wanting to see a romance, a comic tragedy about an onlooker willing something tragic, Anne Fontaine’s Flaubert-inspired meta-pleasure Gemma Bovery takes as its subject the act of watching the lives around us — and of wishing those lives were literature.
How convinced you’ll be by Soaked in Bleach, the latest vehicle for the Kurt-was-murdered theory the private investigator Tom Grant has now megaphoned for two decades, will hinge on how plausible you find its portrait of the Nirvana frontman approaching his end. The film insists that Cobain, far from the…
Hometown hero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is in negotiations to star in and produce a remake of John Carpenter‘s cult classic Big Trouble in Little China; this is indeed, a thing that seems to be on the verge of almost certainly happening. Johnson, coming off a $54 million domestic opening weekend…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek, along with Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, praise the latest Melissa McCarthy comedy, Spy: “She plays a real woman who reacts like a real woman would,” Nicholson says of her character. “It’s a really funny…
Another month, another series of classic films, and with each one, the line-up only grows! Trying to come up with a totally comprehensive list is impossible at this point, but we’ll try to give everyone a solid oversight of all the good ol’ features showing in Miami this month. This…
Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival is changing the rules for its competition and programming, and that could be good news for festival goers looking for quality cinema. The new rules are designed to attract bigger named filmmakers, but are also more inclusive for producers of short films, and…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by crapping in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt.
Tiller Russell’s The Seven Five lets the most corrupt (convicted) NYC cop of the ’80s tell his own story. He relishes the chance.
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), glimpses the bikini-clad babes who await him and informs us, “I may have to jerk it before I even get there!”
The closeup, ostensibly one of a filmmaker’s most valuable tools, is now so overused that it’s practically meaningless. Thanks to TV — and to our habit of watching big-screen movies on increasingly smaller ones — we’re now so used to seeing a shot of one actor talking, followed by a shot of another responding, ad nauseam, that this volley of visual dullness barely registers anymore.
Frédéric Auburtin’s absurdly hagiographic drama United Passions purports to tell the history of FIFA — the world’s governing institution for soccer — from its 1904 founding up until its announcement of South Africa as the host country for the 2010 World Cup.
A movie about bringing down druglords that’s actually mostly about movies, Cédric Jimenez’s The Connection is stretched over driven-cop beats so familiar American audiences could probably follow it without subtitles. (It’s in French — add that to the title, and you get a sense of its police-film ambitions.)
