Live from New York!
In case the star-studded 40th anniversary special of “Saturday Night Live” wasn’t self-congratulatory enough for you, there’s now a documentary singing the iconic late night sketch show’s praises. Did...
View ArticleInside Out
For folks like myself who have spent the past two decades adoring and analyzing Pixar’s cinematic output, the last few years have been a little worrisome. After the unequivocal triumph that was 2010’s...
View ArticleSet Fire To The Stars
“How much trouble can one poet be?” From the outset, Set Fire to the Stars is under no misconception about the true nature of its subject. Dylan Thomas was a troublesome drunk whose reputation both as...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Dunwich Horror
Some things are irresistible. For me, the prospect of watching The Dunwich Horror (1970), starring Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, is one of them. Gidget and “Quantum Leap’s” Al! What a way to spend a...
View ArticleEden
The Romantic poets, morosely fixated on the ephemerality of all things, placed great importance on man’s initial fall from grace, eating from the tree of knowledge and getting booted out of the garden...
View ArticleThe 11th Hour
The 11th Hour takes the pressure of “having it all” to a new extreme. Kim Basinger is Maria, a successful businesswoman with a luxury apartment, a handsome husband and a generous bank account. After...
View ArticleManglehorn
There is a bizarre moment in David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn in which the eponymous character (Al Pacino) is walking by a multi-car wreck. Chunks of red flesh are scattered across the ground and the...
View ArticleBurying the Ex
One of Joe Dante’s best attributes is that, despite being one of the most observant satirists in film, his movies are indefatigably warmhearted and generous. Though he takes on subjects ranging from...
View ArticlePernicious
Three young American women travel to Thailand to spend the summer teaching, but before they set one foot in a classroom they upset an angry local spirit in Pernicious. This VOD horror travelogue has a...
View ArticleMax
A military dog returns from Afghanistan after his best friend is killed in the unusually dark and completely sincere family drama Max. The movie’s poster features a boy and his dog against the...
View ArticleTed 2
Ted was a sleeper hit with fans and many critics in 2012 due to its high-concept approach to lowbrow humor. The sequel that no one was exactly clamoring for also shoots for the moon conceptually, but...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Kids Turns 20!
The story goes that Harmony Korine, a 19 year-old skateboarder, was hanging out in Washington Square Park when a photographer named Larry Clark approached him about writing a film. Three weeks later,...
View ArticleThe Princess of France
The Princess of France opens on a blank screen. Then two sets of subtitles conveying some preliminary comments from a radio DJ who’s introducing a broadcast of Schumann’s First Symphony. The DJ soon...
View ArticleOeuvre: Herzog’s Feature Films: Heart of Glass
Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass is best known for its unorthodox approach to direction: Herzog placed most of his actors under hypnosis in order to more convincingly depict an entire town falling under...
View ArticleInfinitely Polar Bear
At first glance, Infinitely Polar Bear has a lot in common with Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and The Whale, another tragicomic, semi-autobiographical period snapshot of a family divided. Where Baumbach’s...
View ArticleRevisit: The Pit and the Pendulum
Today, Roger Corman’s producer credit is so linked to sci-fi TV movie cheapies that, to the casual observer, his hugely influential role in the cinematic landscape can be easily overlooked. When his...
View ArticleThe Overnight
Does anyone do obsequious better than Jason Schwartzman? It has been nearly 20 years since the actor broke through with Rushmore and since then he has made a career of playing foppish kings,...
View ArticleMagic Mike XXL
Despite being a sequel and technically part and parcel of Hollywood’s opposition to new, original content, Magic Mike XXL is a brilliant piece of counter programming. In a summer dominated by reboots...
View ArticleThe Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened?
In the late 1990s, Warner Bros. announced Superman Lives as the movie that would revitalize the Superman movie franchise after it had fallen flat with 1987’s abysmal Superman IV: The Quest for Peace....
View ArticleOeuvre: Herzog’s Feature Films: Stroszek
Werner Herzog’s sixth fiction feature has a tone unique among his films. Split between Germany and America, the 1977 film was the first and perhaps only time in his career that he simply observed the...
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