Ring rubber bells, beat cotton gongs, strike silken cymbals, play leathern flutes. The cats and cans and you and I and all such things with souls, We shall hear: “Walter Paisley is born.” And the souls become flesh. Walter Paisley is born! This is how Walter Paisley, the bumbling-busboy-turned-celebrated-sculptor played by the late Dick Miller […]
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MOVIES: “Animals” “Before You Know It” “Corporate Animals” “Dirty God” “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile” “The Farewell” “Fighting with My Family” “Greener Grass” “The Hole in the Ground” “Honey Boy” “I Am Mother” “Little Monsters” “The Lodge” “Native Son” “The Nightingale” “Relive” “Share” “Sister Aimee” “Sweetheart” “Them That Follow” “Troop Zero” Day 1: Thursday, […]
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(On HBO.) Mandy, the high school basketball player at the center of Share, starts the film by waking up on her front lawn — not an auspicious way to start the day (or a movie). Played by excellent newcomer Rhianne Barreto, Mandy is hungover, and her memory of the previous night is only slightly jogged […]
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(Screened at the Sundance Film Festival; U.S. release date TBD) Dirty God is in the tradition of English “kitchen sink dramas” and dreary Mike Leigh films, a blunt, bleak story about a working-class person whose already miserable life is made worse by someone else’s cruelty. Jade (Vicky Knight), about 20 years old and the mother of […]
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Indie jack-of-all-trades Mark Duplass’ roots in the mumblecore film movement have given him a strong base for understanding how to capture the ups and downs of human relationships. His writing on films such as The Puffy Chair (2005), Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), and Blue Jay (2016) all focus on deconstructing what keeps people […]
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A young makeup artist named Gloria travels down to Mexico to help a friend win a local beauty pageant. After witnessing a shooting at a dance club, Gloria’s friend is kidnapped and she finds herself caught in the crossfire between the corrupt Mexican law enforcement and a local cartel. Gloria is forced to work with […]
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Serenity is: A) an early contender for the worst movie of 2019; B) a bonkers attempt at beachy noir starring Matthew McConaughey as a fisherman named Baker Dill; C) a bizarrely perfect companion piece to The Book of Henry; D) all of the above. The answer is, of course, D – all of the above. The […]
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For the second year, Turner Classic Movies’ weekly trip to Noir Alley – hosted by Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation – is taking February off for the channel’s “31 Days of Oscar,” when all it airs are films that won or were nominated for Academy Awards. But there are a […]
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When actor Bob Balaban was gathering a crew for his directorial debut, Parents, a would-be applicant walked in and said, “I don’t really want to do this with you, I just came in to tell you you’re evil.” That’s great press for any horror movie, but especially for the first feature from an actor who […]
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M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable was arguably years ahead of its time. Released in 2000, five years before Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Shyamalan’s low-key superhero/supervillain origin story was the sort of grounded comic book film that studios are still trying (and failing) to make. With his 2017 psychological thriller Split, the writer/director upped the ante considerably, […]
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The final scene in 2017’s Split revealed that the movie, thought to be a self-contained M. Night Shyamalan thriller, had been a secret sequel to the writer-director’s own Unbreakable from 17 years earlier. While that twist was a very novel one at the time, it has been recently revealed to me (thanks once again to […]
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Although it caters to a large community of retirees, the Palm Springs International Film Festival still features its share of daring selections, on a program full of awards favorites (thanks to the festival’s timing, right in the middle of awards season) and official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (this year’s festival played […]
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