Blues legend Bessie Smith was arguably America’s most powerful black woman during her heyday in the 1920s and ’30s. Her reign wasn’t just based on being the highest-paid African-American entertainer of her generation, but, according to the new HBO movie Bessie…
In March, the Miami International Film Festival hosted the Florida premiere of Iris, with fashion icon Iris Apfel herself in the audience, watching the film for the first time. Minutes before, while chatting in the back room of O Cinema Miami Beach, she’d revealed it was her first time watching…
“I’m over people who think they’re funnier than the movie,” says LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson, in the wake of her recent piece, “Stop Laughing At Old Movies, You $@%&ing Hipsters.” Joining her — *in the same room, for the first time ever on the podcast* — as usual…
Sofia Vergara is built like an amphora, a living testament to the form ceramicists throughout the centuries have adored. In the fleet and gloriously ridiculous comedy Hot Pursuit, Vergara plays Daniella Riva, a mobster’s wife who needs to be escorted from San Antonio to Dallas, where she’ll testify against the head of a major drug cartel.
Iris Apfel isn’t exactly a household name, unless we’re talking about very stylish households. From 1950 to 1992, Apfel ran Old World Weavers, the business she cofounded with her husband, Carl, which faithfully re-created antique textiles for use in home decorating.
Always an eagle-eyed portraitist of contemporary Italy and its socioeconomic peccadilloes, Gianni Amelio hasn’t had a film released stateside in more than 15 years, and Intrepido: A Lonely Hero — a strange, gentle, whimsically formulated concoction — may give us a clue as to why.
Though it’s hard to believe in 2015, there was a time when fictional heroines didn’t have to be role models, when a character’s backbone could be more than just a row of vertebrae lined up into teachable moments. It’s wonderful that modern readers love Jane Austen — we still warm…
One of Kristen Wiig’s finest moments as a movie star is a throwaway bit of shamed, silent, morning-after comedy: Her Bridesmaids character is skulking out of the home of a cad played by Jon Hamm. She’s playing it cool, swallowing the humiliation of her bad choices, trying to show him and herself that she doesn’t need him for anything.
One of the most inspired ideas in late-middle Woody Allen pictures comes in Deconstructing Harry, a movie about how Allen loves Bergman, hates Philip Roth, and isn’t quite clear on what “deconstruction” means. Allen stages passages from fiction written by the protagonist, a novelist named Harry; one features Robin Williams…
When sexy bad boy, and self-proclaimed old man, Anthony Bourdain heads to your town, and invites nearly every person in town (unless you’re in the media, ahem) to appear on his incredibly popular CNN show, Parts Unknown, you watch the goddamned thing when it airs. I figured as a sort…
New month means new movies, except we’re focusing on the classics here! So while Avengers: Age of Ultron takes over every multiplex, raking in those millions, here’s a variety of options if you’re looking for something a little more vintage. It’s not everything, but you won’t be short on options any…
Avengers: Age of Ultron director and screenwriter Joss Whedon wants to give us everything in his movie, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat, writes LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson in her review of the film, which opens May 1. Joining her on…
Depending upon whom you talk to, we live in an era of conformity or one of anything-goes individuality; in a golden age of television or the brightest of movie galaxies. But just about everyone will agree that we’re ruled by screens of all sizes, which means it’s harder than ever…
Jonah Hill will begin filming his new dark comedy, Arms and the Dudes, in Miami today. In the forthcoming film, Hill plays a Efraim Diveroli, a Miami man heavily involved in the international arms-dealing business. Arms and the Dudes is based on the true story of how two stoners from Miami…
Making and/or having a child seems like such a struggle, or at least film has injected that mentality to someone like myself: someone who will eventually resort to adoption or in vitro fertilization (IVF) because of my queerness. With that said, a film like Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby doesn’t make…
Women with disabilities aren’t exactly in the cinematic spotlight, which is an absolute shame because they’re just as deserving of representation as everyone else. And Laila, the main character of Margarita With a Straw, is no different than any other young woman her age, except for the fact that she…
A post-Wikipedia biographical documentary, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck finds Brett Morgen constructing a feature-length collage of notebook entries, demo tapes, rehearsal footage, home movies, archival photos, and drawings and artwork by the late Nirvana frontman. It’s an impressive, comprehensive assemblage, designed to impart not a point-by-point historical account but,…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos, three enemies, and at least ten films to go before the climactic Avengers: Infinity War — Part II opens in May 2019.
It’s tempting to suggest that if you have any interest in Iranian film in general, or in particular Asghar Farhadi — the director and writer of that shred-your-heart masterpiece A Separation — you should simply get yourself to Farhadi’s About Elly without knowing a thing about it besides its title.
A normal movie ends with the American Humane Association’s assurance that “No animals were harmed.” But Tippi Hedren’s doomed 1981 obsession Roar isn’t normal.
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, we marvel at teen horror film Unfriended, and while it is “85 minutes of watching someone else use a computer,” the filmmaker’s adept at turning a screen into a natural storytelling platform: “Director Levan Gabriadze summons up exquisite unease just by the way…
There are only a handful of films about cruising that actually work: last year’s Stranger by the Lake is an example of a deliciously rare work of art that maintained its initial seduction throughout the entire film. The Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival presents us with Amor Eterno (Everlasting Love),…
