Why don’t they just burst into song? The characters in Damsels in Distress and The Pirates! Band of Misfits were born to belt out show tunes, but with one notable exception, they stop shy of going the full Rodgers and Hammerstein. These featherweight treats might only be musicals in spirit, but they still gave your [...]
Katniss Everdeen took over my life. Deadlines were looming, errands needed to be run, but I could not stop reading. Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” is a grabber. Once the author lays out the foundations of her grim post-apocalyptic society, I found it imperative to discover what happened next to her plucky, stubbornly resolute heroine. [...]
From contemporary Iran to rural Georgia, authority figures don’t fare very well in the current crop of new releases. Maybe it’s all that rampant, headline-grabbing activism currently dominating the news cycle. It may not have been intentional, but three of the titles making their way to local theaters this week couldn’t have been more perfectly [...]
Movies that explore man’s connection with his fellow primates are not exactly known for their gravity. Images of Clint Eastwood and Tony Danza horsing around with orangutans are probably playing in your head right now (don’t try to deny it). When Hollywood deems it worthy to tackle the subject with a straight face, the results [...]
I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this documentary. A film about a chimp with the word ‘project’ in the title indicated some sort of suffering to me. So I headed to the Coral Gables Art Cinema with trepidation and watched Project Nim, which is rated PG-13. According to my production notes, Project Nim is [...]
She puts her makeup on. He sprays on some perfume. An Italian cover of “Bang Bang” plays on the soundtrack. And it doesn’t feel pretentious for a second. The lovestruck duo at the center of Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats should, by all means, make lousy movie subjects. Francis and Marie are vain, self-centered and aggressively trendy. [...]
It hasn’t been a good week for science fiction at the movies. On Tuesday The New Yorker reported that Universal Pictures nixed Pan’s Labyrinth auteur Guillermo Del Toro’s $150 million live-action adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness” because the filmmaker refused to tone down the content from a “hard R” to [...]
It’s been often called Super Bowl for film geeks. For me it’s another opportunity to go on a movie-related rant. Oscar weekend is here, readers, and I’m in a celebratory mood, not just because both frontrunners for Best Picture, David Fincher’s The Social Network and Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, are damn fine movies (that’s [...]
Another Year We all have people like Mary in our lives. The boozy, self-destructive woman at the heart of Mike Leigh’s poignant kitchen sink drama Another Year is the kind of acquaintance who shows up at your doorstep and, a few drinks later, wails to you about all her troubles before passing out in the [...]
It’s been a month since I saw Derek Cianfrance’s bruising breakup romance Blue Valentine, and there’s a particular scene that keeps playing in my head like a broken record. It involves Dean, an underachieving mover played by Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson) with trademark intensity, showing a soft spot for the war veteran whose belongings he’s [...]
The second movie weekend of the new year is upon us, and I’m on an arthouse kick. Which filmmakers have so inspired me to shun the megaplex in favor of more refined screen fare? Call them the observers, inquisitive souls whose strength lies in simply being able to stand back and gaze at their subjects [...]
The Kings Speech For such a beloved holiday, Christmas can sure be a lot of work. Whether it’s decorating that seven-foot-plus pine tree, dedicating and sending all those greeting cards (virtual and tangible), or scissoring away roll after roll of gift-wrapping paper, by the time December 25th gets here you might be feeling ready to [...]
