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July 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Wednesday, August 2, 2017 at 2:29 p.m.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Dunkirk: The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan's entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He's taken the British Expeditionary Force's 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an integral part of Britain's vision of itself — and turned it into a nesting doll of increasingly breathless ticking-clock narratives. Some filmgoers might be expecting a sprawling, grandiose war epic. Instead, Nolan gives us one of the leanest, most ingenious studio films in quite a while: an intercutting montage of competing timelines that expand and contract and collide. And somehow, it's also uncharacteristically intimate. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/dunkirk-movie-review-9502354 1/7

Courtesy of Columbia Pictures Spider-Man: Homecoming: Nobody speaks the web-slinger's famously humane credo — that with great power must come great responsibility — in Jon Watts' brash Spider-Man: Homecoming, the first Spidey flick as ebullient as the comics you read when you were a kid. But that truth pulses through the film: He's protector rather than avenger or punisher, not just of the young woman he crushes on (Laura Harrier) but also of his Queens neighborhood's ATMs and bodega cats, of his classmates and families, even of the criminals he busts (for whom he exhibits a compassion rare in American hero stories). http://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/direct-from-queens-spider-man-finally-gets-a-movie-worth-cheering-9456798 2/7

Saul Martinez 500 Years: Justice prevails at last in 500 Years, the third documentary in Pamela Yates' Guatemalan trilogy, a work hitting screens 34 years after her first installment, 1983's When the Mountains Tremble. That courageous film revealed, in horrific combat footage, the little-reported genocide that a U.S.-backed Guatemalan government waged against indigenous Mayans in the country's western highlands. Decades later, Yates' stunning footage became evidence in the survivors' case against José Efraín Ríos Montt, the junta leader behind the attacks that destroyed more than 600 villages. Yates' follow up, 2011's gripping Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, examined efforts to bring Montt to trial, which included gathering the stories of Mayan witnesses. As a member of Guatemala's congress, Montt enjoyed immunity from prosecution through the second half of the aughts; at the completion of his term, in early 2012, he at last was indicted. Yates' new film returns to the highlands, gathering the testimony of Mayan activists and survivors before leaping into Montt's 2013 trial, proceedings that prove heartening and horrifying. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/movies/500-years-9421163 3/7

Abcko Films At 88 years young, the rebel-shaman filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has led an eclectic life and enjoyed a provocative career not easily encapsulated. "Jodo" has been a playwright and a novelist, a writer of comic books and a musician, a Tarot scholar and the inventor of "psychomagic" therapy. He once was a mime who studied with Marcel Marceau. Jodorowsky began to unpack his origins and his emotional baggage in 2013's The Dance of Reality (the first in a proposed pentalogy of autobiographical magic-realist fantasies), which concerned his melancholic 1930s childhood in Tocopilla, Chile. You need not have seen that film to delve into its spectacular follow-up, Endless Poetry, which picks up in the 1940s with Alejandro and his Jewish-Ukrainian folks moving from their provincial home to open a garment shop in Santiago. Dazzlingly shot on location by cinematographer extraordinaire Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love), this color-splashed, user-friendly sequel draws a heartfelt if comically absurd portrait of a young man growing into his identity by leaning into his creative passions.http://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/endless-poetry-movie-review-9478304 4/7

Shudder Kuso: It's nearly impossible to categorize the first feature-length film of Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus, the experimental beatmaster, music producer and rapper). Made up of multiple, wildly varied vignettes that intersect and revolve around the theme of a chaotic post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, where every surviving human is covered in grotesquely bubbled sores, Kuso is an astounding feat of animation, humor and practical effects. Also, George Clinton plays a Svengali doctor who can cure all your ailments … as soon as you lure the crustacean from his ass with a song — a cappella or with fresh beats, whichever you prefer.http://www.miaminewtimes.com/movies/kuso-9403326 5/7

Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios Landline: Jenny Slate's laughter comes out in a wild gush, as though she's been shaken and uncorked, the sound somehow puppyishly sweet and punkishly impolite. Her characters, cheery cynics, often fail to quite match the mood of a room, so their amused eruptions can hurt feelings, stir bafflement, inspire the ol' stinkeye from the stiffs worth laughing at. In Landline, Gillian Robespierre's warm yet prickly comedy, Slate's uncertain Dana shakes off her jitters about her engagement to a drab fiancé (Jay Duplass) by smoking a joint with a foxy alpha (Finn Wittrock) she used to hook up with in college. It's 1995, and they're at a dead-serious drone-guitar performance in a dingy Lower Manhattan club. Almost immediately, Dana's joyous cackles prove too much for the venue. Much of the film asks whether this world offers a right place for women like Dana and her teenage sister, Ali (superb newcomer Abby Quinn), to be their truest selves — whether they're always going to be too noisy, too opinionated, too open about wanting more. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/landline-movie-review-9495767 6/7

Roadside Attractions Lady Macbeth: A “feminist” film need not portray all its female characters in a positive light. Women aren’t a monolith of benevolence. Still, a film with multiple female characters who are equal parts sympathetic and sadistic, who face off against one another in a battle of wits and will, exposing some harsh truths about race, class and privilege, is something rare – something to be tightly embraced. Lady Macbeth — a chilling period piece about a woman who comes into her own savage power, directed by William Oldroyd and penned by playwright Alice Birch — is that film.http://www.miaminewtimes.com/film/lady-macbeth-movie-review-9478307 7/7

July 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for the best films of July 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in August.

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