Holy Hell! Almost Famous Turns 20
The death of rock ’n’ roll has been prophesied over and over again through its nearly 50-year pop cultural domination. But it never really happened – not after the Beatles disbanded, not after disco...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: The Cat o’ Nine Tails
After over performing with his directorial debut, Dario Argento’s sophomore effort, The Cat o’ Nine Tails, would go on to be a film he considered to be his worst. But why such a stark disparity?...
View ArticleBloodshot
As superhero movies continue to dominate popular culture and more and more studios attempt to kick-start their own cinematic universes, it may feel like the comics industry has already been sucked dry...
View ArticleThe Hunt
When it was pulled from release in the aftermath of the El Paso shootings last year, controversial Blumhouse thriller The Hunt seemed destined to get quietly dropped on a streaming service in a year or...
View ArticleM.O.M. Mothers of Monsters
Tucia Lyman’s M.O.M. Mothers of Monsters is a study of obsessive surveillance. IT tells the story of a single mother, Abbey (Melinda Page Hamilton), who endlessly collects recordings of her son, Jacob...
View ArticleThe Postcard Killings
An angry American man with a unique set of skills goes rampaging through the underbelly of Europe in search of the bastards who harmed his daughter. No, it’s not another Taken movie, but you might...
View ArticleTuscaloosa
There are two-and-a-half stories being told in Tuscaloosa, and none of them is done any favors by being mashed together with the others. The year is 1972, and George Wallace, who vehemently opposed...
View ArticleRevisit: 28 Days Later & 28 Weeks Later
It all began with us. That’s the message immediately penetrated to the viewer in Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-apocalyptic horror feature, 28 Days Later. The film begins with a chimpanzee tied to a table,...
View ArticleHeimat Is a Space in Time
For most of us, family history is something inexact, a patchwork timeline cobbled together from old photos and half-remembered anecdotes. For Thomas Heise, however, things are a little more coherent, a...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Slugs
Virtually every nature-runs-amok B-movie is derivative of The Birds. Most post-1977 entries owe a huge debt to Jaws. Juan Piquer Simón’s 1988 cheapie, Slugs, has no intention of hiding these facts....
View ArticleLost Girls
Liz Garbus, known for hard-hitting documentaries like The Farm: Angola, USA and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, brings her investigative approach to Lost Girls, a true-crime dramatization of the 2010...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Four Flies on Grey Velvet
As a director of outré, often nonsensical genre fare, Dario Argento is nothing if not stylish. As required for any respectable purveyor of snazzy ‘70s Italo-trash, he possesses an unerring eye for the...
View ArticleHuman Capital
Director Marc Meyers made a light splash with his 2017 film My Friend Dahmer, a surprisingly humanizing take on Jeffrey Dahmer’s teen years. Hollywood works in funny ways, and the success of Dahmer has...
View ArticleResistance
“What is the best way to resist?” Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz answers this timely question with a compelling if sometimes pedantic story of a small group of freedom fighters in Nazi-occupied...
View ArticleDosed
The thorny nature of North America’s current opioid crisis is wrought with many branches, each disparate element twisted over the other like a pretzel from hell. In his documentary Dosed, director...
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Rediscover: The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice
From an aerial view, Japanese directing giant Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) lived to witness many key events in his country’s 20th century history: from the Great Kanto Earthquake to the Manchurian Invasion...
View ArticleHooking Up
Sam Richardson and Brittany Snow elevate Hooking Up into a serviceable not-too-dark comedy from its rather forgettable origins. The story of a man with a recurrence of testicular cancer and the...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: 13 Going on 30
Some comedies are warmly received upon release with the caveat they are “lightweight,” that they serve as a momentary distraction or a brief escapist indulgence. 13 Going on 30 was certainly thought of...
View ArticleBlow the Man Down
A crime caper of characters in the realm of Fargo, an unraveling of small town secrets akin to Blue Velvet and a sea chantey chorus of New England accents could all be used to describe the self-assured...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: The Five Days
Although he has been much-lauded for his signature style, Dario Argento tossed much of that away in The Five Days, his ill-conceived, quasi-historical comedy from 1973. The film explores one of the...
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