Set aside your visions of histrionic, paranoid fireworks. Oliver Stone’s whistleblower biopic Snowden finds the director in an unusually somber and controlled mood, perhaps because of the introverted, awkward nature of Edward Snowden himself. The former CIA employee and National Security Agency contractor, who in 2013 exposed the U.S. government’s…
What’s constant in Katherine Dieckmann’s films – Motherhood (2009), Diggers (2006) and A Good Baby (2000) – is an attention to characters and place. Many of us in the world of film reside in the big coastal cities, but a good number come from somewhere else, smaller towns with subtle…
Looking back at this dismal summer of superhero adaptations, I am reminded of something Chris Rock said during the 77th Academy Awards: “There are only four real stars, and the rest are just popular people.” This was February 2005, mind you — a few months before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins…
There is less than a week-and-a-half of Summer left; it’s officially time to panic. If the pumpkin-flavored everything and Halloween decorations in Walmart weren’t sign enough, Fall is almost here. Admittedly this is not as troubling for South Floridians as it is for the rest of the country, but the end of…
The Hollars tells the familiar tale of a dysfunctional family pulled together by unfortunate circumstances. John Hollar (John Krasinski, who also directed) is a frustrated graphic novelist with a pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca (Anna Kendrick). When he gets the news that his mother, Sally (Margo Martindale), has a brain tumor, he…
Bridget Jones mines the riches of embarrassment. Her gaffes, blunders, stumbles and pratfalls provide the laughs in the atypical romcoms built around her, films that rely heavily on the comedy of idiosyncrasy. Bridget is no outsider: She’s a straight, white, middle class, university-educated woman with a London apartment, a media…
You might remember Piff the Magic Dragon and his self-described “grumpy magic” comedy routine from his stints as a finalist on Season 10 of America’s Got Talent and Penn & Teller’s Fool Us. His brand of magic and humor caught the world’s attention in large part thanks to his unique…
This summer, New Times set out to find the best beach in Broward. Mission accomplished — congratulations, Fort Lauderdale Beach! On our journey, though, we came across all sorts of places we had either forgotten about, taken for granted for years, or straight-up didn’t know about. The Best Beach series reminded us that…
The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth airs Sundays on Showtime In filmmaking, an assembly cut is when recent dailies are strung together in rough narrative order to create the first, very raw draft of the movie. Though it by no means lacks polish or editorial intent, Showtime’s…
The Bachelor stands erect as the vanguard of heterosexual romance competitions. Bachelor in Paradise (BIP), whose third season concludes this week, is the sunburnt, daydrunk cousin of the ABC franchise. Set in the Ewok Village on the Planet Endor (the perfect place to fall in love), the summertime distraction stars…
Who doesn’t like to laugh? Possibly the only thing better than laughing is making someone else laugh; unfortunately, the former is much easier to do than the latter. Some people are just born with comedic juices running through their bodies, while others need to work a little harder on their…
Ira Sachs has become one of our great American filmmakers. His newest, Little Men, about two teenage boys (Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri) who become best friends even as their parents face off over the fate of a small dress shop in the ground floor of a Brooklyn home, is…
Friday, September 9 It was inevitable that America’s obsession with pumpkin beverages would soon intersect with the craft beer world; thus, the pumpkin beer was born. Though memes ridiculing such brews are easy to find, you consider yourself an elite drinker who has an appreciation for exquisite flavors. Screw the…
Eight minutes into the pilot episode of Cinemax’s new crime show Quarry — an uneven but largely rewarding translation of Max Allan Collins’ crime books into emotionally challenging, character-driven television — Marine Lloyd “Mac” Conway, Jr. (Logan Marshall-Green) returns home a day early from his second tour in Vietnam. By…
Like American Sniper (2014), Clint Eastwood’s Sully is a movie of nightmares. In Sniper, Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) sits rigidly in the living room, imagining the gunfire, roaring helicopters and wailing bystanders of Fallujah playing out on a turned-off television as his children race through the house. In Sully, Chesley…
Before The Eric Andre Show came along, I always thought acting like a complete lunatic on television was mostly a white-people thing. As a culture, African-Americans generally frown upon the idea of being unabashedly clownish for the masses — black folks call it “showing your ass.” All those years of…
Cities, like young people, are forever becoming something new. The latest tender charmer from Ira Sachs chronicles the growing pains of teens and Brooklyn with the wry sensitivity and eye for economic reality that distinguished Sachs’ Love Is Strange (2014) and Keep the Lights On (2012), which began a sort…
Where were you when you learned that you’d be making your DJ debut at the biggest rave of the year? And that said rave was only eight hours away? Ethan, the sheepish main character of Netflix’s straight-to-streaming EDM movie XOXO, gets the news in his kitchen, where his mom is cooking breakfast…
As the last few weeks have reminded us, we’re smack-dab in the middle of rainy season here in South Florida. Summer might be coming to an end, but hurricane season isn’t, so you can count on some rainy days in the near future. The rain creates a dilemma in Broward;…
Opening your film on the image of a child plummeting off a cliff, presumably to his death, is a fairly foolproof way of getting the audience’s attention. And Alexandre Aja’s hyper-stylized coming-of-age-movie-slash-fantasy-slash-psychological-thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax excels at grabbing you with a steady stream of provocative and ornate…
Thursday, September 1 Good timing, or mere coincidence? Either way, with the recent conclusion of the Summer Olympics in Rio, it makes sense to continue to shine the spotlight on Brazil’s vibrant culture. The celebration continues with ArtBrazil 2016, the fourth-annual monthlong event that will, for the first time, be…
Were we wrong to root for Kevin Smith? When he burst onto the scene in 1994, it was the most improbable of rags-to-riches movie narratives: bankrolling Clerks by selling his comic book collection and running up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Almost overnight, he joined the likes of…
