Fifty Shades of Grey is opening nationwide, and in New York, Village Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl connects via the magic of the internet with LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson to discuss the hotly anticipated movie starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, adapted from the E. L. James novel…
The steps leading to the altar of Terrence Malick are practically a safety hazard, cluttered as they are with assorted offerings of frankincense and myrrh, bouquets draped with sashes that shout “Good job!” and perhaps a virgin sacrifice or two. Critics and certain moviegoers love him that much, which explains…
BERLIN — Riding from the Berlin-Tegel airport to my hotel on a crisp, sunny day last week, my cab passed the magnificent golden angel statue known as the Victory Column, a monument erected by the city in 1874 to commemorate assorted Prussian military victories of the day. But people all…
This Sunday night, The Walking Dead returns for the second half of season five. It got me thinking: What if The Walking Dead were set in Miami? Yes, this is a thing I have spent time thinking about, mainly because so many details in the original are so ridiculously Georgia-specific…
(Heavy spoilers for the pilot; very light spoilers for the second and third episodes.) There’s more than one way to start a revolution. You can get high off your own sense of righteousness and authenticity, as celebrity chef and Fresh Off the Boat memoirist Eddie Huang recently did by calling…
To the idle viewer, the small acts of resistance on display in Timbuktu might seem ready-made for Upworthy, little liberal lessons just waiting to be parceled out to anyone who “won’t believe what happens next.” Yet that type of self-righteous sentimentality — and its opposing strawman, knee-jerk cynicism — is…
It’s hard to imagine that George Lucas has cared much about the fan revolt he’s faced since ’97 or so, the year he thumbed CGI Colorforms all over the original Star Wars movies. But there’s one criticism that seems to have stung him: that Lucas, a good Marin County liberal,…
“You ready for another miserable video game?” I heard one critic crack to another as I settled in for Jupiter Ascending. “Maybe in March we’ll see this year’s first good movie,” his pal said back, as if Girlhood, Hard to Be a God, Amira & Sam, Timbuktu, Joy of Man’s…
As FilmGate Interactive prepares to launch at O Cinema Wynwood, executive director Diliana Alexander explained exactly what the event will be bringing for Miami’s cinema buffs. “I would say that it’s a hybrid between a festival and a conference,” she explains, “because it has a such a heavy teaching component.”…
This year, Sundance started a week late to bypass Martin Luther King Day. Perhaps that’s why buyers bid on films like sprinters racing after lost time. Thanks to their spending spree, every movie on this list should eventually make it to a theater near you — or at least to…
Jill Soloway, who has described her new series, Transparent, as just like any other family series, understands the difficulty of family. Her feature debut, Afternoon Delight, proved as much; exploring the unhappiness of marriage, it’s a perfectly blunt, comic approach to depicting a woman who couldn’t cope with the boredom…
Halfway through Laura Gabbert’s documentary City of Gold, a salute to Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic’s brother Mark reveals a dark family secret: Gold grew up devouring iceberg lettuce and orange Jell-O. Every day, we eat. It’s a must. And those meals tell a story: The peanut sauce…
Miami Ocean Studios is in negotiations to lease 160 acres of land between the Palmetto Expressway and Florida’s Turnpike. The company expects to begin construction next year on a “Hollywood-class” studio. The land being negotiated falls just north of Opa-locka Executive Airport near the Dade-Broward county line and is currently…
Tuesday at the recently renovated Tower Theater on Calle Ocho, Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) announced the lineup for its 32nd edition. Running from March 6 to 15, with screenings at seven theaters throughout Miami-Dade County, MIFF will exhibit 125 films from 40 countries. They include 94…
It’s hard not to look at the poster for Dolphin Lover and immediately wonder whether the documentary is serious. It doesn’t get much more provocative than the words “This man had sex with a dolphin,” and it’s a surefire way to pull folks in to Kareem Tabsch and Joey Daoud’s…
The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York who’s striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through…
There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one we can probably agree on: Something has gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
While many of Oscar’s big shots clock in at more than two hours (led by favorite Boyhood, at 165 minutes), some filmmakers remain committed to telling unique and inventive stories that don’t require viewers to set aside an entire night to enjoy. The Academy Award-nominated short films — which, for…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Let’s leap back to 1994. Grunge and gangsta rap dominated MTV — music that claimed to be gritty and honest. Yet that year in Orlando, as far away from Seattle as it gets, a Ponzi-scheme scam artist named Lou Pearlman selected five lads aged 14 to 21 to form the…
Jude Law, once so shiny-penny-clean and pretty — and with the kind of chin dimple that might have inspired Audrey Hepburn to ask, as she did of Cary Grant in Charade, “How do you shave in there?” — is only now reaching the age where we can call his face…
