Were the World Mine closes the 10th Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on a musical, fantastical note. The movie, which director Tom Gustafson expanded from his short film Fairies, takes the familiar scenarios of high school angst and adolescent crushes and gives them a wonderful musical spin, complete with elaborate sets and choreography.
SMALL SCREEN Nanking (7 p.m. Tuesday, Cinemax) -- Germany's crimes during World War II have been endlessly documented, but Japan's much less so -- at least in the West. This documentary on the Japanese army's murderous 1937 conquest of the Chinese city of Nanking could change that. Using archival footage and first-person accounts read by actors such as Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, Nanking recounts how 20,000 civilians were killed and 20,000 women and children raped in a six-week orgy of...
When the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival was born in 1999, there had been no Brokeback Mountain, no Will & Grace and no L Word. Films that featured gay and lesbian characters in prominent roles were scarce and almost invariably hailed from the independent circuit -- i.e. low budget, scrappy pictures with no recognizable actors.
The good news about My Blueberry Nights, the first English-language movie by director Wong Kar Wai (Chunking Express, In the Mood for Love), is that it delivers the profound visual pleasures that have become part of the filmmaker's signature (the cinematography is by Darius Khondji, who makes a fleeting shot of blueberry pie and melting vanilla ice cream look better than the real thing).
The sight of a chorus of octogenarians singing The Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go is odd and enchanting enough to grab anyone's attention (The Clash? Really?). But what makes Young@Heart such an ingratiating experience goes far deeper than the novelty of seeing old people singing hard rock tunes.
When The Visitor opens, 62-year-old economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is already in a profound funk. Walter is a widower. He has lost interest in his students; he has no apparent friends; and he can't even muster the enthusiasm to apply himself to the piano lessons he's taking.
CAPSULE REVIEWS
The following capsule reviews were written by Miami Herald movie critic Rene Rodriguez. BEFORE I FORGET (AVANT QUE J'OUBLIE) (Unrated)
Heartwarming is the operative word in Breakfast with Scot, a crowd-pleasing comedy that makes up for its formulaic, sitcom-ready premise with likable performances and an inviting sense of humor.
BIG SCREEN Baby Mama (PG-13) -- Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey and Amy Poehler star as a successful businesswoman (Fey) pining to become a mother and the South Philly working girl (Poehler) she hires to be her surrogate.
A lot of 10-year-olds are going to come out of The Forbidden Kingdom proclaiming it the best movie ever made. That rapture may not be long-lived -- the summer movie season still awaits, and it is loaded this year -- but the enthusiasm is understandable. This restless, furiously paced fantasy, which marks the first on-screen pairing of martial-arts titans Jackie Chan and Jet Li, overcomes a clunky opening 10 minutes to become a feature-length rush of Saturday-matinee adventure and fun.
One of the things that distinguish great actors from merely good ones is that they can elevate the sorriest of scripts through sheer performance. And like any actor whose career spans more than three decades, Al Pacino has starred in his share of turkeys. But even in the worst of them -- Revolution, say, or Cruising, or Two For the Money -- he gives you someone interesting to watch.
88 MINUTES (R)
One of the things that distinguish great actors from merely good ones is that they can elevate the sorriest of scripts through sheer performance. And like any actor whose career spans more than three decades, Al Pacino has starred in his share of turkeys. But even in the worst of them -- Revolution, say, or Cruising, or Two For the Money -- he gives you someone interesting to watch.
MIAMI DADE COLLEGE
For the fourth time in eight years, the Miami International Film Festival is looking for a director. Patrick de Bokay, who took the festival's reins last February from departing director Nicole Guillemet, has been shown the door by Miami Dade College for unspecified reasons. School officials declined to comment on the decision not to renew de Bokay's annual contract.
Filmmaker David Ayer appears to have made it his life's mission to ensure that the world knows that when it comes to corruption, the Los Angeles Police Department ranks somewhere between the Miami International Airport and a Mexican prison.
This review previously was published last month during the Miami International Film Festival. The inspired pairing of Demi Moore and Michael Caine as a pair of thieves in the diamond-heist semi-caper movie Flawless goes a long way toward overcoming the film's slack, leisurely pacing. Moore and Caine (who previously played father and daughter in Blame It on Rio) have an unusual rapport. The film's period setting -- London, 1960 -- helps, too: Director Michael Radford (Il Postino) and screenwriter...
BIG SCREEN Flawless (PG-13) -- Demi Moore is a diamond company executive in 1960s London trying to no avail to make her way in a male-dominated corporate world. Then a janitor (Michael Caine) offers her a chance to pay back her sexist bosses by helping him steal the stones stashed in the company's vaults.
Scott Smith hadn't even finished writing The Ruins -- and Stephen King had not yet hailed it as ''the best horror novel of the new century'' -- when Hollywood studios started clamoring for the rights to turn it into a film.
The Ruins is, with one major caveat, about as good an adaptation of Scott Smith's bestselling novel as Hollywood was ever going to make. Smith's book -- about a group of college kids who stumble onto a hill in the Mexican jungle where a flesh-eating vine dwells -- was the kind of relentless beach read that seemed tailor-made for the movies, at least until you realized you were dealing with a story about a talking plant that drinks blood.
In Leatherheads, director George Clooney proves all the Cary Grant/Clark Gable comparisons right by casting himself in the kind of crowd-pleasing entertainment Grant and Gable made throughout their careers. Essentially a screwball comedy with a sports theme, the movie takes a comic look at the birth of America's pro football league in 1925, when players shared the field with grazing cows and a turnout of 20 people was considered by team owners to be a good day.
Shine a Light opens on a note of tension: Director Martin Scorsese is chasing down Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, trying to find out which song will open the performance he's going to be filming with 11 cameras, each operated by a renowned cinematographer (including Robert Richardson, Emmanuel Lubezki and Albert Maysles, who directed the legendary Stones concert film Gimme Shelter).
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