Rediscover: Three on a Meathook
Maybe this isn’t the best time for a movie called Three on a Meathook. It sure doesn’t sound promising, even if you’ve developed a growing appreciation for grindhouse auteur William Girdler, best known...
View ArticleThe Mindfulness Movement
The stories presented in The Mindfulness Movement are powerful and important, but it all should have been a lot more fun. Directed by Robert Beemer, who did such mesmerizing work with the television...
View ArticleSorry We Missed You
Sorry We Missed You is a working class drama that begins with the lie of freedom. Ricky Tucker (Kris Hitchen) sits across a desk, getting interviewed by Maloney (Ross Brewster), the man who runs a...
View ArticleSea Fever
A surprisingly good and surprisingly timely thriller, Irish director’s Neasa Hardiman’s Sea Fever takes the pretty crowded horror-at-sea subgenre and infuses it with a painfully modern twist: a vicious...
View ArticleMephisto
Hungary’s first Best Foreign Film Oscar winner, István Szabó’s 1981 opus Mephisto, receives a re-release eerily timed for its subject matter of fascism filling a power vacuum of national crisis. It...
View ArticleWe Summon the Darkness
We are in the grips of a phenomenon in Hollywood that can only be called the “Stranger Things” effect. Because of it, everything from the ‘80s is being returned to us with new affection either by...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Inferno
Ranked among Dario Argento’s total career output, 1980’s Inferno often doesn’t rate very high, dismissed as a rote retread of its immediate predecessor, the far-better-received Suspiria. This...
View ArticleSelah and the Spades
Selah and the Spades, like many films and television shows about high school, is both authentic and theatrical. Think “Riverdale,” Brick and “Pretty Little Liars,” all sensationalized yet somehow true...
View ArticleThe Sharks
Rosina, the protagonist of The Sharks, is lost inside her own head as the world moves around her, and in her debut feature, writer/director Lucía Garibaldi does not seem to know what to make of this...
View ArticleThe Grand Bizarre
Jodie Mack’s experimental cinema is one of textures, a matter of collage as much as montage. Posters and cut-outs adorn her movies, so tactile that her work felt three-dimensional well before her...
View ArticleButt Boy
Chip (director Tyler Cornack) has checked out of life. He has a thankless job in sales, a loveless marriage and even his spare time is filled with menial tasks like weeding and mowing around his small...
View ArticleThe Booksellers
One of the great joys in life—and thereby also one of the great tragedies of the COVID-19 lockdown which prohibits such an activity—is strolling slowly through the stacks of a bookshop, scanning...
View ArticleThe Quarry
One of the ironies of The Quarry is the idea that to pass oneself off as a good preacher, all a man has to do is shut up and read the bible out loud. No need for sermons, or for even telling the...
View ArticleOther Music
Remember record stores? Last Saturday was supposed to be Record Store Day, and in the new normal, would-be crate diggers looking for a fix had resorted to online shopping. It’s kind of ironic; the very...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Clambake
“You know, those masters of yours have hidden motives. They’re trying to control people’s minds and use them for their own damn purposes.” This perhaps prescient bit of paranoia comes from no less than...
View ArticleBlush
In the early seasons of “Mad Men,” Betty Draper was a bored-out-of-her-sanity housewife who became fixated on the only nonconformist in her neighborhood. She also had an unclassifiable relationship...
View ArticleAbe
Parts of Abe, a good-natured but superficial family movie, are very appealing. There are mouth-watering close-ups of exotic dishes, rambunctious dinner scenes and fine performances from likable actors....
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Tenebrae
In 1982, Dario Argento was coming off of a series of personal and professional peaks and valleys. 1977’s Suspiria’s esteem has grown over time, but it was well received in 1977, particularly by...
View ArticleBeastie Boys Story
Rather than subject the masses to another talking head laden hagiography or, worse, a paint-by-numbers biopic, longtime Beastie Boys collaborator Spike Jonze has created a mixed media doc exploring the...
View ArticleTo the Stars
To the Stars takes place in that period of history when everyone knew what so-called “close female friendships” really were, no one particularly wanted to say what exactly they were out loud and a lot...
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