The Price of Freedom
The Price of Freedom takes a timely and riveting long view of the many events and shifts that led to the rise of gun culture and gun laws (or lack thereof) in America. Judd Ehrlich’s sixth documentary...
View ArticleHydra
For fans of Japanese action cinema, the name Kensuke Sonomura will likely be a familiar one. His furious choreography and action direction has been a mainstay throughout collaborations with directors...
View ArticleThe Woman Who Ran
In terms of story and especially structure, The Woman Who Ran sneaks up on the viewer when least expected. On the surface, the movie is a simple one, chronicling a weekend trip taken by Gam-hee (Kim...
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Rediscover: Girlfriends
The Bechdel Test, as overused it may be when writing about art, is an important litmus when examining relationships between women in film. How often do women truly talk to one another on the screen...
View ArticleMeander
Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 indie horror Cube casts a long shadow for a movie crafted for under a million dollars and with a single set. Resident Evil would upgrade the opening razor-wire dicing to a laser...
View ArticleNobuhiko Obayashi’s War Trilogy
Most moviegoers got their first impression of Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi from his 1977 horror movie Hausu, rereleased to cult acclaim in 2009. Its eye-popping scenes included the sight of...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Xtro
As a kid in the early ‘80s, there were two movie posters that genuinely gave me the creeps in our local video rental store. One was John Carpenter’s The Thing, a film which set new standards in special...
View ArticleWe Intend to Cause Havoc
Spectrum Culture staff would like to ask something of any European filmmakers who might plan to make a documentary about musicians from another culture; please, leave yourself out of the story....
View ArticleRoadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
At first, it’s hard to think of the point of Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain. As an early barrage of footage of the late chef and TV personality’s long history in front of cameras for...
View ArticleGunpowder Milkshake
On paper, Gunpowder Milkshake seems like assuredly awesome women-led action. A cast stacked with new genre favorites and major mainstays, a promised up-and-coming director whose previous feature was a...
View ArticleRediscover: Johnny Guitar
When it was released in 1954, Americans didn’t know what to do with Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar. Audiences and critics alike seemed to grapple, uneasily, with the film’s central tension: Is this a...
View ArticlePig
It is hard to believe that Nicolas Cage was once an A-list movie star. In the past decade, he has starred in a good number of direct-to-VOD movies and genre flicks, many of which barely have made a...
View ArticleMama Weed
Mama Weed has some strange ideas about where our sympathies should lie. The premise is a familiar one, especially for fans of a long-running, massively popular television franchise that began in a...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: From the Dark
Irish horror has been something of an unsung treasure trove of scares in recent years. Creature horror thrived among the bovine bone parasites in 2005’s Isolation, the tentacled sea suckers of 2012’s...
View ArticleHow to Deter a Robber
A great deal of confidence both defines and, ultimately, undermines the promise of How to Deter a Robber, which carries a premise of surprising cleverness. For all intents and purposes, writer/director...
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Oeuvre: Fellini: Fellini’s Casanova
Fellini’s Casanova presents a very simple question to its viewer: what kind of cinephile are you? The film is essentially plotless, intentionally silly and far too long, but it features superb...
View ArticleOld
You wake up one morning and when you look in the mirror, you barely recognize the person staring back at you. There are more lines, more wrinkles and more patches of grey. You look way more tired than...
View ArticleAll the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip-Hop and Skateboarding...
The premise of All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip-Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997) is all in the title. Director Jeremy Elkin and the extensive array of talking heads examine both the...
View ArticleAiley
Ailey, the second full-length documentary feature by director Jamila Wignot, honors the life of Alvin Ailey, one of the most famous choreographers of modern dance and most important choreographers of...
View ArticleMandibles
Can a giant house fly be trained to do your bidding? By the end of director Quentin Dupieux’s dryly hilarious buddy movie Mandibles, you will believe in strange magic, or at least that you can build a...
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