This month’s fringe VOD offerings feature unauthorized depictions of Elvis Presley and Lynyrd Skynyrd, plus a homicidal pro wrestler, a pair of perky teen detectives, and more from the far reaches of the direct-to-video release schedule. The Short History of the Long Road (select drive-in theaters June 12; VOD June 16) Disney Channel star and […]
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Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods came along at the right time. These days, the streets are covered with protesters – Black, white, whatever – officially fed the fuck up with an utterly broken police system, a system where an officer can kill an African-American man like George Floyd in broad daylight (while a woman films […]
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In recent years, Judd Apatow’s work as a director and a producer has taken on a decidedly more mature and bittersweet tone. His earlier days directing movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up presaged this, but hid their vulnerability beneath a thick haze of weed and sex jokes. Films like Funny People and This […]
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It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when comic book characters had little to no hope of success in Hollywood. Films adapted from comic magazines or newspaper “funnies” were few, given that the properties were seen as substandard material suitable only for children (or worse, thanks to Frederic Wertham’s “Seduction of the […]
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Chantal Akerman was 25 years old when her technically groundbreaking, emotionally devastating, and alternately revered and reviled Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles played at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. Speaking about the film in 2009, Akerman remembers the reaction: “People kept getting up and leaving. You could hear the seats banging. That’s […]
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With the passing of Stuart Gordon this past March, cinema lost one of its great provocateurs. An agitator and enemy of good taste from the start of his career in the Chicago theater scene—where, during his 1968 production of The Game Show, he would lock audiences in the theater until they literally rioted—Gordon proudly carried […]
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No matter how good a film is, or how satisfied a director and an audience may be with the final product, there will always be the urge to go back and play with it a bit more. But films are frustrating in that respect: after a certain point, they have to be released into the […]
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In 1984, David Lynch’s ill-fated adaptation of Dune was released in theaters to poor reviews and disappointing box office. Given that Lynch had shot about a half-hour of material that was cut from the theatrical release, distributor Universal Studios and their partners at MCA Television prepared a four-hour TV version for syndicated broadcast in 1988. […]
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If you’re one of the many folks looking forward to the Disney + release of Hamilton in July, good news: you can get a head start on uplifting Broadway hip-hop content with We Are Freestyle Love Supreme. The Hulu documentary, out this weekend, charts the course of the improv hip-hop collective that launched the careers […]
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Decades after her death in 1965, Shirley Jackson’s shadow looms over American horror, continuing to make a space in the genre for a female point of view originally shaped by mid-century domestic unease and social isolation. Film and TV adaptations have recreated her tableaus of loneliness, communicating the ostracization, clever nastiness, and small-town toxicity that […]
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Forget punching Nazis. Are you craving to see a gang of white supremacists ripped to bloody bits? Good news for you: Becky has arrived. Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, co-directors of the action-packed B-movies Cooties and Bushwick, reteam for their best yet. Becky centers on a pint-sized Rambo who uses her forested tree fort as […]
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The first cut comes a few minutes into the second scene of Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, and it happens so quickly that if you glance away for a second, you might not catch it. Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger) is relaxing in the backyard of his sister’s place, and she offhandedly mentions, apropos of nothing, “Twenty-five […]
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