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…
We begin this week’s Voice Film Club podcast with a strange story about Giles Corey, who famously said, “More weight!” as stones were laid upon him during his witch trial. The end of the year is sort of like that for film critics, who are pressed upon with all the…
Jason Fitzroy Jeffers is no stranger to South Florida. Both musician and journalist, he’s made an impact on this and many local publications. With a recent focus shift turning to filmmaking, Jeffers’ first official production, Papa Machete has been picking up momentum and earning accolades from film circles. “You and…
Sony assumed North Korea would hate the movie. The question was: What would it do? Pyongyang had just tested its atom bomb and threatened “preemptive nuclear attack.” And the Supreme Leader with his finger on the trigger was barely over 30, with less than two years of experience. But Kim…
Editor’s note: Sony has officially canceled the theatrical release of The Interview following terrorist threats against theaters, and the announcement that several major theater chains had opted not to exhibit the film. The following review was written before Sony pulled The Interview — and stands as a reminder that world-shaking…
By Ian S. Port The funniest and most incisive show on television is ending this week — so let’s look back at how it began. On October 17, 2005, a power-suited Stephen Colbert furrowed his eyebrows and showed off highlights of his new set. Red letters above him shouted, “The…
TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…
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…
“Politics really isn’t my specialty,” Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) shrugs to a naval commander (Charles Dance) in an early job interview scene in Morten Tyldum’s choppy biopic The Imitation Game. Yet no less than Winston Churchill would credit Turing as the main cause of the Allies’ victory over the Nazis…
For reasons that are perhaps understandable, stories about women finding themselves — or their voices or their inner courage or any number of things that are apparently very easy to mislay — are big business. But even if Cheryl Strayed’s hugely successful 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on…
The du Pont family made its fortune selling gunpowder during the War of 1812, and soldiered on to invent everything ever worn by a cop: Kevlar, nylon, polyester, synthetic rubber. If you’ve cooked on Teflon pans, that money’s theirs, too. That means you’ve supported American patriotism, or at least heir…
The original Broadway Annie was a kiddie musical that wasn’t for kids. It was a period piece about the Great Depression — both a hooray for Warbucksian success and an elbow-jab making clear that rich folk need to share — with a detour into a Hooverville and a key cameo…
TV continued to unmoor from its origins and transform into something else this year. No longer tethered to a specific appliance, a particular kind of storytelling, or even commercial concerns, “television” now feels like an increasingly obsolete word. But that’s a discussion for another time, for we’ve come to celebrate…
As the year in moviegoing draws to a close — and as critics busy themselves drawing up lists and handing out awards — it seems time at last to look ahead. Here are the 10 films to get excited about over the year to come. 1. Jauja (Dir. Lisandro Alonso)…
What kind of circle is time again? A year after blowing the doors off our annual critics’ poll, golden boy Matthew McConaughey won just a single vote for his turn in the loudest movie of the year, Christopher Nolan’s tears-in-space effort Interstellar, which has tied with the unprescient Transcendence as…
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…
