Hello movie fans and welcome to this month’s edition of Dollar Matinee. Summer blockbuster season is going full tilt, which means hella sequels—also known as next-generation embellishments (and hopefully clever ones) on intellectual properties now 20-30 years old. Here comes “28 Years Later” and “Jurassic World Rebirth.” But if fast-moving zombies or genetically rebooted dinosaurs don’t flip your script, there’s nothing like a killer doll: That’s right, “M3GAN 2.0” is back and she’s ready to party. As if AI isn’t already scary enough. 

If you’re looking for an alternative to all the hoo-ha, though, you’re in luck (unlike most of the cast of “M3GAN 2.0”). Acclaimed 2023 documentary “Razing Liberty Square” returns to PBS this month where it streams for free through July 15. The film was directed by Katja Esson, a German filmmaker who moved to Miami in the 1980s and watched the city blow up into the metropolis it is today. The housing project in Liberty City—where Oscar-winning director Barry Jenkins grew up, and set his film “Moonlight”—becomes a critical site in an ongoing wave of climate gentrification in Miami, where rising sea levels are driving real estate developers further inland and the 753-unit public-housing complex lays square in the wrecking ball’s arc. The ironies abound, as the community arose in the 1930s to house Black residents who weren’t allowed on “whites-only” beaches. 

“The dramatic changes happening in Miami’s Liberty Square are a looking glass for contemporary issues of wide-scale significance: the affordable housing crisis, the impact of systemic racism and climate gentrification,” Esson told PBS. “Miami is experiencing sea-level rise before the rest of the country. What is happening in Liberty Square is a prescient story of what is to come, and strategies put to the test here are being closely observed by the rest of the world.”

Happily, the Sunshine State is very much on the radar of Moviemaker magazine, which just included two Florida film fetes on its annual list of “Fifty Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.” The survey is aimed at filmmakers eager to get their work into festivals and focuses on the upsides of their potential experience. Alongside major international events such as the Locarno Film Festival and colorful regional affairs such as North Carolina’s Cucalorus, the list recognizes the Miami Jewish Film Festival (“a platform for connection and cultural exchange through storytelling”) and the Miami-based American Black Film Festival (“one of the most respected festivals focused on Black artists and has drawn a who’s who of A-list attendees”). Congrats to both! 

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