Pump Up the Volume never capitulates. In its opening scene, a law-breaking teenage radio DJ who goes by the moniker Hard Harry ( known for excessive masturbation during his illegal missives) wonders, “You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up?” The defiance of that rhetorical question imbues every moment of […]
Read more
Random Acts of Violence isn’t the cleanest or cleverest of horror movies, but it displays a grindhouse ambition that’s worth paying attention to.
Read more
How can we know Nikola Tesla? The 19th-century Serbian-American inventor was a formative figure in the advances of electricity – but he was not a master showman like Thomas Edison nor a savvy businessman like George Westinghouse. Today, his legacy involves a dry history of his inventions and a fetishistic embrace by environmentalists, idealists, and […]
Read more
The duality that defines Agnés Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 is present from, quite literally, its opening frames: a title sequence in which our protagonist goes for a tarot card reading, and the writer/director both lays out the themes that will consume her interest for the next 90 minutes, and sets a style of […]
Read more
The gloomier the world gets, the more lugubrious the art reflecting it becomes. The world has never witnessed a calamity of the scale of the Holocaust, a disaster purely propelled by hate; eleven million humans never saw the light at end of the tunnel they were physically and figuratively shoved into before boiling down their […]
Read more
In this month’s fringe VOD releases, ghosts and filmmakers find love, bad things happen in escape rooms and wildlife sanctuaries, and a haunted tiki statue causes chaos. Endless (VOD and select theaters August 14): Riley (Alexandra Shipp) is a smart girl from a rich family who plans to go to law school. Chris (Nicholas Hamilton) […]
Read more
Death be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,And soonest our best men with thee doe […]
Read more
Boys State begins with a famous quote from George Washington’s farewell address about the potential danger of political parties, warning the American people that the system which helped the country get its start could just as easily be its downfall. While watching the film, it’s hard not to consider another infamously ominous warning – this […]
Read more
For a movie about an alien that orally falls out of a human’s mouth every night and feasts on the brains of fear-ridden people, Sputnik left me indifferent as hell. The latest indie thriller from IFC Films’ Midnight wing — striving as always to give you low-budget, genre entertainment now that Dimension Films is basically […]
Read more
“If everybody want to stick together, I stick with ‘em. But if nobody want to stick together, I stick alone, by myself.” -Sven Hansen In 1947, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (because of course there was one), a political activism group that Walt Disney co-helmed as First Vice-President (because […]
Read more
It’s one of the most striking openings in cinema history: A burly, shirtless man in a black hood stokes a brazier, heating up a branding tool which will be used to sear the letter “S” into the flesh of accused vampire Princess Asa Vadja, who is being executed for her crimes alongside her lover and […]
Read more
You probably are not giving much thought to either The Expendables, an Avengers-style roundup of action stars with AARP cards, or Eat Pray Love, a travelogue of white feminism, as they approach their tenth anniversaries on August 13. (As you shouldn’t.) The movies have deservedly faded from memory and, even worse for their makers, cable […]
Read more