A Sequel Set in Miami That Forgets, Beautifully

The film, which arrives in theatres on Friday, is a sequel that no one — least of all its director, a filmmaker named Sonja Reyes, who has been quite public about her ambivalence — appears to have particularly wanted to make. The first film, released seven years ago, was a small, well-loved thing about a Miami taxi driver and his mother. This one is about the same taxi driver, seven years later, and the fact that his mother is gone.

What Reyes has done, cannily, is refuse the sequel's usual obligations. There is no returning villain. There is no larger world. There is, instead, a middle-aged man driving the same routes he drove in the first film, past the same Cuban bakeries and the same causeway ramps, and finding, in each of them, a slightly different vacancy. In the film's best scene, he pulls into a Publix parking lot after a sudden rain and simply sits there, listening to the radio, for what feels like a long time and is, in fact, three and a half minutes.

It is the longest three and a half minutes I have spent in a movie theatre in a year. It is also the most Miami. There is a smell, to a Florida parking lot after rain, that is composed of hot asphalt and gasoline and the faint sweetness of orange peel, and Reyes has, somehow, filmed it. I do not know how she has filmed it, but I know it when I smell it.

The sequel, in the end, does what a sequel almost never does. It forgets the first film — not by ignoring it, but by moving past it, the way a grown child moves past a house he no longer lives in. The film is, in this sense, an act of grief. It is also, quietly, one of the best American films of the year.