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…
Not all sequels suck. Case in point: the Borscht Film Festival, which launches its ninth edition this week at venues across Miami. The work coming out of the Borscht Corp. film collective has earned major accolades over the past several years. Bernardo Britto’s Yearbook took home the Short Film Jury…
“Lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” Martin Luther King, Jr., said that many years ago, but we heard it recently from a 12-year-old girl. Teakahla WhiteCloud lives in Ft. Lauderdale, and in her short years, she’s become one of the world’s great…
Here are movie moments from 2014 I’ll never forget: Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s sad pop tart smacking her ass in Beyond the Lights, the sickroom choked with flowers in Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst’s Greek island all-nighter in The Two Faces of January, and the entire soundtrack of…
Despite its sumptuous displays of feudal opulence — cavalries, silk gowns, all the naked female extras money can buy — Netflix’s Marco Polo feels distinctly like scraps. Turgid, fatuous, and humorless, the streaming site’s newest series is a grave miscalculation of what has made Game of Thrones, its obvious model,…
It’s practically impossible to define actress Rosario Dawson by the roles she’s played. She’s kicked ass, dished out the drama, and sung her heart out in dozens of diverse roles over practically two decades. Unlike the Chris Rock’s character in their new movie, Top Five, she’s never going to get…
After all the cheap headlines and media celebrity stalking courtesy of Art Basel, Miami’s party town persona is the one most on everyone’s minds. Thankfully, Ovation was in town to capture some of the city’s meatier attributes with a new show, American Canvas, that sniffs out the most culturally unique…
Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of…
Flip open your Bibles to Numbers 12:3 to find the first inaccuracy in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings. “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth,” sayeth the Good Book of our hero, played by Christian Bale, an…
The heavens dance. From the bottom of the world, where your eyes might freeze in your face, we see stars pulse against seams of luminous dust, all in slow and dizzying rotation. Then come the lights: Ribbons of green unspool and shimmer and whip across the sky, suggesting angels and…
The biggest laugh I heard from the audience at my screening of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies came from seven words in the end credits: “Based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.” Just picture that tweedy Oxford philologist nodding in pleased approval at this adaptation of his…
Whatever it is Americans want out of life — and it’s not even something we can precisely define ourselves — it was nowhere in evidence on December 3, when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner in July. We all know we live…
We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a Thomas Pynchon story, before hosts Alan Scherstuhl and Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice, and Amy Nicholson of LA Weekly, move onto Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie adaption of his novel, Inherent Vice. It’s “in some ways a godawful mess, indulgent…
Following in the awesome footsteps of years past, films from the Miami-centric Borscht Film Festival are making national waves. Sundance announced today that two of Borscht’s featured short films for 2014 have been selected to screen at the illustrious Sundance Film Festival next year: Papa Machete and El Sol Como…
Hospitals are depressing. Until recently, medical shows glossed over this basic fact of life by focusing on the most glamorous clique within them: doctors. For the past two decades, the upwardly mobile audience identification integral to most TV shows taught us to look away from the bedpans and sheaves of…
There’s only a week left before Borscht opens it doors. Get psyched up by enjoying this teaser of their upcoming films. There are conjoined twins, bodybuilders, sandwich meat, and vomiting. What’s not to love? See more: Borscht Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup…
As the year comes to a close and January makes its way into our lives — with both award season buzz and junk that studios want to dump — the Miami Jewish Film Festival is ready to launch. And it has plenty of gems in its lineup. Just over a…
Much like many Cubans in South Florida who longed for and spoke often of the pre-Castro Cuba of their memories, Miami-bred, Los Angeles based artist Stephanie Hutin is fixated on the pubescent period in her youth. It’s a place in time that is so unique, she says, “You cannot understand…
To outsiders, the tears of Penn State fans seem pretty far down the list of tragedies ramified by the Jerry Sandusky case, in which a celebrated assistant coach was convicted of molesting young boys. In Happy Valley, a rich and troubling documentary about the case and its fallout, we see…
When we’re little, the things we want so badly in our miniaturized here-and-now are often impossible for grownups to understand. That’s certainly the case with the 9-year-old boy at the center of Venezuelan writer-director Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair: Junior (Samuel Lange), a kid growing up in a rough housing complex…
Tales of the Old West continue to make up a significant portion of our cultural narrative, mostly because we still like to comfort ourselves with stories showing that ours is a land of opportunity. Making the trek to the American frontier promised a new life, or at the very least…
