In 1902, Dr. John Kellogg changed two letters in the word “sanatorium” — defined as a resting spot for disabled soldiers — and changed the world. “Sanitariums” became the health resort of choice for the wealthy and weary, instilling in the privileged a sense that they were perpetually ill, and…
George Miller’s sci-fi series began in 1979 with the low-budget, practically DIY gearhead grindhouse flick Mad Max, and it was revived in 2015 with the delirious action masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. All along the way, these pictures have captured something about their times that has allowed them to break…
After announcing one of the coolest events in town for February (and likely all year) — the Coral Orgy — Borscht Corp. has continued revealing the expansive Borscht Diez film festival lineup by way of email. Unsurprisingly, the Saturday and Sunday events show no sign of slowing down what filmmaker Billy Corben says is “one of the greatest film festival lineups ever.”
Legion, the much-anticipated new FX series created by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, wastes no time plunging us into the murky depths of its lead’s unraveling mind, from blissful youth to harrowing adulthood plagued by a failed suicide attempt. Every scene is a dense visual and sonic cornucopia. Even quiet moments…
Boundaries are violated repeatedly in Fifty Shades Darker, a film that demands even more submission of its audience than its predecessor, 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey. No safeword can protect you from the sequel’s depleting incoherence, its punishing pileup of plot and its inability to successfully stage, even once, the…
In an attempt to spread cinema all over Miami-Dade and move away from the overexposed Wynwood neighborhood — now the go-to location for practically every event in town — the film festival Borscht Diez will hit the beach for the third day of the upcoming fest. After jaunts to the Everglades and Stiltsville, Borscht Diez will host events all day Friday, February 24, in a multitude of Miami Beach locations.
Borscht Diez, the tenth edition of Borscht Corp.’s biannual film festival, will begin with a funeral, but don’t worry: There is life after death. On the second day of the 2017 fest, Borscht will take to the bay, so get ready to throw on some boat shoes.
For the past few months, Borscht Corp. has been steadily teasing the death of its Borscht Film Festival in anticipation of the fest’s tenth edition, Borscht Diez. Evident in the hashtag #pray4borscht, the ability to light a candle and sign a guestbook to join the filmmaking nonprofit’s mailing list, and the brilliant memorial website on which users can leave a tribute, the dedication to the death of the Borscht Film Festival is wild but no stranger than anything else the collective has done in its decade-long history of filmmaking.
First, the good news: The dog doesn’t die in John Wick: Chapter 2. This will come as a relief to some of us who adored the original, an action masterpiece about a retired hitman taking unholy revenge on the Russian scumbags who killed his pup and stole his car. The…
Given that it’s a sequel/spinoff built around a mostly throwaway gag in The LEGO Movie, The LEGO Batman Movie is funnier than you might think it has any right to be. But those of us who were expecting something more can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. The LEGO…
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman is a tense, visceral drama of wounded masculinity — and therein lies part of its problem. Farhadi, whose About Elly and A Separation are two of the greatest movies of the past decade, can find tension in the most mundane of exchanges, and he…
Contemporary American horror’s obsession with morality and psychotherapy can really be a downer. In 2002, Gore Verbinski expertly remade the J-horror hit Ringu with a layered story about a single mother (Naomi Watts) who watches a cursed videotape. To stop the curse, she travels through the warped psyche of the…
How do you sell an international comedy-action superstar to an American audience? Sony Pictures, the distributors of charming Hong Kong action-fantasy Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back, still haven’t figured out how to pitch comedian-turned-filmmaker Stephen Chow outside of Asia, especially since Chow has stopped starring in his…
A new year kicks off, full of film festivals, and the call of awards season catch-up beckons. For those who want a little more history and a little less Oscars, though, there’s always Miami’s bundle of classic film showings. So what’s happening this month? Here’s everything you have to pick…
We made it to February! Hooray us! Hey, it wasn’t a guarantee, and I’m so proud of us all. As a reward, make sure to watch every single one of these TV shows this month, and I don’t want to hear any excuses! You deserve it. The Quad (BET), Feb…
How much do you love AMC’s The Walking Dead? Do you find yourself imagining what it would be like to be on the show, trying to survive the zombie apocalypse alongside the remaining survivors? Do you care so much about certain characters that you become physically ill when they are killed? Are you so obsessed that you would consider taking a vacation to a private Bahamian island with some of the cast and crew?
James Baldwin passed away in 1987. Well, that’s partially true. He indeed succumbed to stomach cancer at age 63, but most of his life essence remained, via his books and essays deconstructing American culture. Filmmaker Raoul Peck (Lumumba, Sometimes in April) has been a Baldwin devotee since reading The Fire…
In Staying Vertical, as in nearly all of French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie’s tonically unorthodox work, the emphasis is on the abundant possibility of pairings and practices when people get horizontal. Filled with quite literal chubby-chasing, Guiraudie’s sexually anarchic romp The King of Escape (2009), for example, centers on a middle-aged…
Like Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro travels a straight, well-researched path from the darkest tragedies of American history to the ones that plague the country today. Both films filter African-American life through the prism of the societal construct called race, but while DuVernay’s dissertation focuses…
Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer/director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest. This quicksilver, emotionally astute comedy operates on many different registers and moods: Whoopee cushions and gag teeth are part of the fun, but so too is a…
The title offers the first clue about what’s off. Calling this movie The Comedian suggests that Robert De Niro will be playing something definitive or archetypal, as if there’s just one kind of stand-up comic, as if he’s representing a genus rather than embodying someone singular. A glut of other…
In October of last year, in southwestern Kansas, three members of a militia called “The Crusaders” were arrested and charged with planning to blow up an apartment complex in tiny Garden City housing 120 Somali immigrants. According to Tom Beall, the Acting U.S. State’s Attorney, one defendant had said that…
