“The post-apocalyptic future of Turbo Kid might be set in 1997, but the film’s stylistic sensibility is straight from the 1980s. That’s the point, of course; the whole film is intended as an ode to the campy gewgaws of ’80s pop culture. It’s a movie that’s about looking back at a bygone time, both for … Continue reading
“With another year comes another Joe Swanberg joint about middle-class ennui. There are any number of reasons to roll one’s eyes at the prolific indie filmmaker’s latest, Digging For Fire—its blatant heteronormativity, adherence to traditional gender roles, unscripted moments of marble-mouthed philosophizing, and severely unlikable characters. But in the department of good news, Swanberg’s go-to … Continue reading
“Is Alex Ross Perry America’s best contemporary filmmaker? If your voice is counted among the uproar raised over Perry’s 2014 film, Listen Up Philip, that shouldn’t even be a question, but that film plays only to palates honed to withstand the acrid taste of wanton awfulness. Perry makes lovely, fractured movies about hideous people. Watching … Continue reading
“Georgia Byng’s precocious literary moppet, Molly Moon, missed the boat with Harry Potter in the aughts and failed to make the journey across the pond to American shores. Many years later, though, she’s managed to get herself a ticket into U.S. theaters with Christopher N. Rowley’s Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism, which … Continue reading
“Like the protagonist of his film, Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra suffers from an identity crisis. The package sounds great on paper: A stoner targeted for elimination by the CIA learns he’s a highly trained government superspy of the Jason Bourne persuasion who gets reactivated in the face of imminent death and becomes a very, very … Continue reading
“If there’s one question worth asking after the credits roll on F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton, it’s “Why didn’t he make a series instead of a film?” Next year, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger will roll out Vinyl, a ten-episode series on HBO that focuses on the developing aural confluence of hip hop, disco … Continue reading
“Brothers Shaul (Eitan Cunio) and Yaki (David Cunio) Cooper are as close as two siblings can be: They watch movies together, they pee together, and, when their family’s financial chips are down, they kidnap and ransom people together. Israeli filmmaker Tom Shoval’s film Youthbegins with Shaul hatching the brothers’ plot as he follows their target—wealthy … Continue reading
If you’ve seen the coming-of-age movies and crime flicks that influence Sam de Jong’s Prince, you can guess where it’s heading within its first 10 minutes. Teenage boys with too much free time and too many hormones, menacing older boys who haunt their inner city neighborhood, pulsing house scores, adolescent infatuation, misguided masculinity, material obsession, … Continue reading
“Have you ever sat through a movie so ponderous and pointless that you felt the minutes ticking by as your patience slowly dwindled to zero? That’s more or less the experience of watching Tyler Shields’ immeasurably boringFinal Girl, a film injudiciously stitched together out of so many retread genre tropes that they wind up leeching … Continue reading
“For all of its oddities, grotesqueries and eccentricities, the single strangest thing about Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (Hausu) is probably its heritage. How does a legendary studio like Toho commission a film to capitalize on the success of Jawsand wind up with a haunted house flick? Forget the fact that House shares practically zero DNA with … Continue reading
“Since its coining in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, who observed from afar something dark, quite literally, going on at the American cinema, the term “film noir” has been debated and debated and debated some more. Is it a genre? A subgenre? A movement? A trend? A commentary? A style? For the purposes of … Continue reading
Beefy film noir, violent, lurid crime flicks, Carroll Ballard, and early Stephen Frears make up the bulk of this month’s Criterion offerings. (Via Paste Magazine.)
“If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” When W.E. Hickson popularized this crusty old Thomas Palmer aphorism back in the 1800’s, he couldn’t have known that one day, one of America’s most high profile movie studios would take the phrase to heart with not one, not two, but three attempts at building a franchise … Continue reading
“Should we consider Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet kids’ fare? The default categorization for any animated movie with a child protagonist is “children’s film,” but if it’s easy to picture a theater full of tykes getting swept up in this movie’s gorgeous imagery, it’s equally as difficult to imagine them nodding along with its philosophical apothegms. … Continue reading
“So here we are, up to our elbows in the ignorance of polemic B.S., puzzling over when exactly America came to the saturation of Trumps and Huckabees braying cultural calumnies in the press. If you need a convenient scapegoat for all the jackasses jockeying for position in today’s presidential rodeo, maybe you should just blame … Continue reading
“Brazilian renaissance man Paulo Coelho has lived a life best described as quixotic. He’s well-known for penning The Alchemist, a slim tome that’s become the most widely translated novel by a living author. Left in the margins of his literary success are a variety of experiences, like his teenage rebellion against social norms, which sparked … Continue reading
“Toward the end of I Am Chris Farley, Brent Hodge’s biography of the late, great comic force of nature, Bob Odenkirk measures the tragic circumference of Farley’s death in one quote: “It’s just rare that a person has that much joy, and brings that much happiness to everyone around them. But with Chris…there’s a limit … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 