This Tuesday, the Miami Jewish Film Festival will feature a series of experimental, avant-garde films by two of contemporary movie-making’s greats. Bill Morrison and his regular collaborator composer, Michael Gordon, will appear for an evening of seven short films, conversation, and live music at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Morrision and…
When Miami-based filmmaker Kenny Riches got the call from the Sundance Film Festival, he could barely hide his excitement from close friend Robert “Meatball” Lorie. Riches’ film, The Strongest Man, had been accepted and Lorie was the film’s lead. They were both working on building the VIP section at Design…
How quickly things have changed in Cuba. After President Obama’s declaration of “normalized” relations between the U.S. and Cuba, Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider’s documentary Havana Curveball already captures what is, perhaps, a different Cuba. The new policy would have certainly made the mission of 13-year-old Mica Jarmel-Schneider a little…
Because January is the dumping ground for mediocre Hollywood movies, Coral Gables Art Cinema is kicking off the year with a series of classic films that will remind cinephiles what great movies are. Few directors have had the lasting influence of Alfred Hitchcock, known for his masterful use of the…
The most distinctive feature of the filmmaking team of Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer is the bags under their eyes. It’s one day before the first night of Borscht9, a film and visual arts festival Leyva co-founded with kindred spirits at New World School of the Arts back in 2004…
In a nondescript, one-story house not far off NE 79th Street and Biscayne Boulevard on Miami’s Upper Eastside, a collective has set up shop to finish works for the 2014 Borscht Film Festival. The local group of visual artists and filmmakers has spent more than a decade opening eyes to…
You don’t have to look too deeply into the short film Papa Machete to see the ethos of the Miami-based film collective Borscht. The short is both poetic and absurd; observant and human. For a short film no longer than nine minutes long, it offers a layered view of a…
In a nondescript, one-story house not far off NE 79th Street and Biscayne Boulevard on Miami’s Upper Eastside, a collective has set up shop to finish works for the 2014 Borscht Film Festival. The local group of visual artists and filmmakers has spent more than a decade opening eyes to…
Though we did not arrive inside Spinello Projects’ Auto Body exhibition in time to catch Cheryl Pope in the act of obliterating more than 500 water balloons hanging from the ceiling with only her head, a pool of water running out of the Giant Motors Auto Body garage and onto…
It feels lazy to call Miami-based artist Jorge Enrique a mixed media artist. He blends image and sculpture so thoroughly it confounds the mind. Look deeper at his three-dimensional works hanging off of walls or stretching up from the ground and you will find elements of photography hidden beneath brush…
As long as there is human expression in art, there will be problems with art. Humanity is filled with contradiction. People love and hate. They can create and destroy; they can inform or withhold. There is the desire to express and impress. Art created and consumed by such beings is…
As Art Basel Miami Beach looms, the Miami Beach Cinematheque is cuing up the films of one of the 20th Century’s greatest, most iconic artists: Andy Warhol. The retrospective “Warhol’s Silver Screen/Silver Factory” began this month. The films, dating from 1964-66, all explore famous starlets of a by-gone era and…
A newly renovated cinema house in North Beach is ready for its close-up. Once owned by Wometco and then Regal Cinemas, the Byron Carlyle, named after the avenues that sandwiched it when it first opened in 1968, will reopen Friday under the direction of O Cinema with the Michael Keaton…
A newly renovated cinema house in North Beach is ready for its close-up. Once owned by Wometco and then Regal Cinemas, the Byron Carlyle, named after the avenues that sandwiched it when it first opened in 1968, will reopen Friday under the direction of O Cinema with the Michael Keaton…
Though he is working with drama on a very pure level in his feature debut, filmmaker Peter Sattler admits there are some surreal aspects to his movie, Camp X-Ray. “It had a very universal message of just finding commonality in a stranger that transcends language and cultural barriers,” says the…
Though he’s probably best known as the “Kingslayer” Jaime Lannister on the hit HBO swords and sorcery series Game of Thrones, Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has been a respected actor in world cinema since his breakout performance in the 1994 film Nightwatch. That film was remade in 1997 starring Ewan…
In a unanimous vote, the Coral Gables Art Cinema’s Board of Directors have appointed a pioneer of film exhibition in Miami as its director of programming. Though in recent years he made name for himself as a Grammy-winning producer of Latin music, Miami’s knows him as a legend in the…
It’s only a few days until a taste of the annual Miami International Film Festival (MIFF) invades the newly renovated Tower Theater in Little Havana. The name of the minifest — MIFFecito — is a play on the cafecitos so prevalent in the neighborhood. MIFF executive director Jaie Laplante says…
Maybe it’s a cultural thing. In Hollywood movies, fat people are often the butt of jokes and more often than not, obese actors embrace the stereotype that they’re just funny-looking fools. So they take the parts and dive in with gusto to make careers exploiting themselves for ridicule. What makes…
With Lake Los Angeles director/writer Mike Ott presents a heart-rending but placid portrait of the often solitary pain of the undocumented immigrant. Ott effectively uses a quiet, low-key cinematic delivery that creeps up on the viewer for a simple, devastating finale that raises small gestures to noble acts of kindness…
Though actor Roberto “Sanz” Sanchez lives in Los Angeles, he has a strong attachment to Miami. He grew up in Little Havana, after immigrating at 3 years old from Cuba to meet his mother in 1969. Tower Theater takes up a big part of his childhood memories in the neighborhood…
Let’s face it, James Franco’s Child of God, a movie about a lonely man living in the Tennessee wilderness who takes up necrophilia and murder, is a difficult movie to enjoy. However, that does not make it a film to be reviled. The film, based on an early Cormac McCarthy…
