They say Twitter can’t really change your mind about anything, and maybe that’s true. But it can certainly solidify your thinking, pulling you off the fence about a questionable issue and setting your wishy-washy opinions in stone. Take, for example, me and this cursed video: I had been wavering, for weeks before this video crossed […]
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Truffaut’s famous dictum regarding the impossibility of ever making a truly anti-war film is, usually, equally applicable to movies about cops. Today, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others at the hands of law enforcement, much of the cultural discourse has been focused on the role movies and […]
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It is fascinating now, in 2020, when Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader is a celebrated cult classic of queer cinema—recognized by the Criterion Collection during Pride, no less!—to look back on the film’s initial reception in 2000. The reviews were, to be blunt, cruel. Slate called it “sniggeringly one-sided” and “lazy counterpropaganda.” Salon described […]
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The first two minutes of Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 feature film crawl forward from the lake setting with overwhelming Manfredini-esque horns and strings. It’s a heavy-handed prompt: you’re supposed to be scared. You’re getting the formula. Or are you? Relatively bloodless and progressive compared to its contemporary brethren but still distressing in its usage of transgender […]
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Demi Moore’s apartment in St. Elmo’s Fire is a truly fabulous sight to behold. Her living room walls are painted a shocking pink that offsets a self-consciously tasteful brown couch and armchair and geometric coffee table. The seating is piled high with pink, blue, and cream colored pillows. Dramatic plants sit on the coffee table […]
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John Lewis, the distinguished Democratic Congressman from Georgia, moves throughout his own documentary, John Lewis: Good Trouble, like one of those elder townspeople you see in Westerns, someone who both walks and talks very quietly, has stories for days, and, despite his solemn demeanor, has probably seen and been through a whole lotta hell. He […]
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In the five years since Hamilton’s debut, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical has saturated popular culture to the point of parody. It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t know the show’s opening lines, or doesn’t have “The Schuyler Sisters,” “My Shot” or “You’ll Be Back” floating through their head at least once a week. All this is […]
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“What do you think you are doing?” yells the village elder, to the boys he cannot see. “Playing a game? Who are you playing with?” Once he’s gone, the younger of the boys retraces the old man’s steps, marching and barking in a spot-on impersonation, and the older boy giggles. The opening scene of Elem […]
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Genre filmmaking is a precise art, and yes, that includes the much-maligned romantic comedy. A number of intangibles all have to click together to make the whole thing work: the chemistry of the leads, the effectiveness of the meet-cute, the difficulty of the obstacles facing the relationship, the triumph of their reunion. There is a […]
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There are so many troubling elements to Force of Nature that it’s tough to know where to begin. Stars Emile Hirsch and Mel Gibson have both behaved reprehensibly (and sometimes illegally) in their offscreen lives for years. The movie’s sympathetically portrayed main characters are cops who disregard the rights and reasonable concerns of everyday citizens […]
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On the night of September 16th, 1984, Crockett and Tubbs cruised a jet-black Ferrari Daytona convertible into pop culture immortality to the tune of Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight.” Miami Vice did the impossible – it took MTV seriously. Hill Street Blues veteran Anthony Yerkovich and budding big-screen director Michael Mann tapped into a […]
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David France is quickly becoming the go-to filmmaker for excellent LGBTQ activist documentaries. France started his directing career with the Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague, detailing the AIDS crisis and the story of the activist coalitions ACT UP and TAG in the framework of a thriller. His Netflix documentary The Death and Life of […]
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