Movie Reviews
Get the latest movie reviews from our in-house critics, Shirrel Rhoades and Ian Brockway. You’ll also find reviews from film festivals and advance screening movies. Do you have what it takes to be a Guest movie reviewer? Send us your review to info@TropicCinema.com for approval and maybe you’ll earn a spot! Want to make sure you never miss a review? Follow the Tropic on Facebook for daily updates!
Front Row at the Movies: Amazing Grace
Because of technical difficulties, the film ended up in the studio vaults for over 38 years. Before director Sydney Pollack’s death in 2008, he turned the footage over to Alan Elliott, who spent two years completing the film. The film finally premiered at Doc NYC three months after Franklin’s death –and 46 years after the original filming by Pollack.
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Front Row at the Movies: The Mustang
Something of a character study, it is Schoenaerts' intense performance that holds the film together. His shaved head, soulful eyes, and muscular demeanor suggests a convict who simply wants to be left alone. But when it comes down to it, he can’t turn his back on the mustang he’s paired with.
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Tropic Sprockets: The Public
Actor-director Emilio Estevez directs the well-intentioned yet tepid drama “The Public,” about a homeless occupation of a public library in winter. The film is well-made and slickly produced but suffers a bit from a hammy performance by Alec Baldwin and a conventional treatment that feels like television.
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Tropic Sprockets: The Mustang
This film excels precisely because it does not have an agenda or a stance, simply presenting events as they occur. We know what Roman is like locked in the stifling plain square of a prison and we know what mustangs feel sequestered in a wooden pen: two animals are revealed inter-connected by their emotions.
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Front Row at the Movies: Matinee
Tropic Cinema is celebrating movies made in Key West with a special showing of “Matinee." We follow the adventures of a Key West boy whose dreams inhabit the Strand Theater—and a flamboyant Hollywood producer who comes to town to promote his horror flick in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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Front Row at the Movies: The Public
It took Emilio Estevez over a decade to put the film together. He says, “This movie is about misfits, and outcasts, and marginalized people who don’t get movies made about them. And here they’re empowered. They see themselves as the Davids against the Goliaths.”
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Tropic Sprockets: Hotel Mumbai
Dark and foreboding, this is a story where darkness gains the upper hand. Tense and apprehensive without fanfare or excess, “Hotel Mumbai” is a near perfect study of Mumbai’s most violent attack that deserves to be alongside Paul Greengrass’s unsparing “United 93.”
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Tropic Sprockets: The Aftermath
There is some actual solid chemistry between Knightley and Skarsgård. The only flaw is the by-the-book melodrama and Jason Clarke’s role which feels stricken by anemia. All of the furtive touches and breathy exhalations prove a tease with a pace that feels like television.
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Front Row at the Movies: Hotel Mumbai
Newbie director Anthony Maras (he’d only done a handful of shorts before this) scores a bulls-eye with his ambitious first feature, “covering every corner of the hotel and making each gunshot or explosion feel like the real thing.”
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Front Row at the Movies: The Aftermath
The British seem to be a nostalgic lot, looking back on love-in-wartime stories as if recalling a more noble epoch when they were young and reckless, lost in the aftermath of military triumphs. A blend of romance and sprawling human tragedy.“Testament of Youth” was such a reverie. “Atonement” too. And now we have “The Aftermath.”
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