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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Comedian Robert Klein sometimes does a bit about his role in Hooper, the stuntman movie that unsuccessfully sued The Stunt Man to be called The Stunt Man. He attended a college screening shortly after it opened and stuck around to expound on his feature-length Peter Bogdanovich impression. Tragically, the audience only raised their hands for […]
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For 64 years, the Eurovision Song Contest has been an epic annual international extravaganza, pulling together 42 nations to celebrate their cultures and creativity through a music competition that is full of fashion, flare, and fabulous camp. For Europe, it’s an institution, with 182 million viewers tuning in just last year. For Americans, it’s largely […]
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One of the big set pieces in Peter Segal’s My Spy is a grade-school art competition, in which our hero, a CIA agent posing as a friendly neighbor, attempts to blend in with the rest of the yuppie parents and relatives. Put on the spot, he starts babbling about how art appeals to his duality; […]
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When a filmmaker tells you what influenced them, believe it. Back in 2017, when Jordan Peele was making the rounds promoting his feature directorial debut Get Out, he spoke at length about the “social thrillers” that inspired it – genre films that were rooted in the issues of the moment, and smuggled social commentary in […]
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The summer camp sex comedy is a cornerstone of 1980s cinema, and at first glance 1980’s Little Darlings looks like a minor example of the genre, without the pop-culture impact of something like the Meatballs franchise. Even the plot sounds like prime material for the parody of Wet Hot American Summer: Two teenage girls make […]
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It is slightly cynical (but not necessarily inaccurate) to describe Disney’s business strategy for the last decade or so as built, almost entirely, on nostalgia. The “live-action,” sometimes even shot-for-shot, remakes of animated classics like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Cinderella. Series announcements on the streaming service Disney+ that nearly universally […]
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Scary stories are inherently political. How couldn’t they be? They tap into our greatest fears, and whatever those happen to be is a commentary on society at any given time. But the most enduring horror films also evolve over time, morphing to represent different fears as new socio-political ills emerge. Zombie movies, for example, have […]
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Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network, out this weekend on Netflix, is an intriguing entry in the prolific auteur’s catalog. This espionage thriller about the Miami Five – a group of Cuban intelligence officers arrested by the U.S. government in 1998 – hews a little more closely to Assayas’s 2010 political thriller mini-series Carlos than his more […]
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A glance at Babyteeth’s brief synopsis makes it seem like this shattering Australian tragicomedy could be an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. But despite the shared DNA of a gravely ill teen and her bad boy love interest, this feature debut from TV director Shannon Murphy grows into something entirely unlike those treacly romances. […]
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It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong, and I’m 6’4”, so I admit that I’m wrong a lot. And I’m going to do it again, right now. A couple of years back, I wrote a book called It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye (PLUG), […]
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In the decade after Stonewall, gay culture exploded and thrived in ways previously unthinkable. One filmmaker who covered every facet of it – from the parades to the adult film market – was Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., who also holds the distinction of making the first dramatic feature about AIDS, 1985’s Buddies. For Bressan and […]
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