|Finn Odum| 0. The Fool. I've always had a thing for weird little freaks. They’re exactly what they sound like: people whose behavior is absurd or unsettling. They have complicated relationships with subjects like sex, drugs, and religion. They can be repressed or unhinged...

|Lucas Hardwick| (And behold, let thine eyes be warned; yay verily, here there be spoilers, so sayeth the Lord.) One of the cornerstones of any healthy marriage is to go out on a date once in a while. Occasionally, I like to take Mrs. Hardwick to a fancy joint like the McDonald’s...

|Jay Ditzer| A new wave band and three guys named William team up for movie soundtrack magic. Like most film directors, the late great William Friedkin had a career of peaks and valleys. After getting his start in a Chicago TV station’s mail room, he eventually began directing...

|Luke Mosher| Among the many kinds of new films released every year, I often find animation the most exciting. The form is endlessly mailable, and animators are always finding new techniques to dazzle and new worlds to explore. Takehide Hori's one-man production...

|Michael Wellvang| Abel Ferrara’s King of New York is not a “great movie.” Nor is it trying to be. The timing of its release, just nine days after Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, has invited unfair but inevitable comparisons that plagued the film since before it was ever shown.

|Brogan Earney| In the year 1987, masculine energy was at an all-time high in cinema. Movie fans all over the country flocked to theaters to watch their heroes do the impossible. Whether it was Dutch and Dillon handshaking their way through an alien Predator...

|Luke Mosher| György Fehér’s Twilight (1990) opens with an aerial shot over the forested Hungarian mountain Csóványos while an ambient song drones in the background like the hum of an airplane. On the ground below, two dark figures ride in the back...

|Casey Jarrin| Every morning in tenth grade, I’d press PLAY on my Panasonic VCR, the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now cued up and ready to explode into orange-red-pink pyrotechnics of helicopter-war-as-cinema-painting, soundtracked by Jim Morrison’s...

|Lucas Hardwick| High school…shit; I was still only in high school. Every day I thought I was gonna wake up and that book report would be done. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing written, and not much read. I hardly said a word to my sophomore English teacher until I said...

|Nick Kouhi| It’s easy to label Brian De Palma’s work as an extended exercise in voyeurism. But in a career spanning over half a century, the enfant terrible of the New Hollywood has transcended charges of Hitchockian pastiche with his perspicaciously (and....

|Courtney Kowalke| I cannot escape the reach of Ancient Greek theater. The last piece I wrote for Perisphere was about Mai Zetterling’s The Girls and a fictional production of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata. It turns out a large part of director Brian DePalma’s inspiration for...

|Mia McGill| If you ask someone what their favorite queer comfort film is, you’ll turn back a wide variety of answers; maybe some cult classics like But I’m a Cheerleader or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or newer faves like Bottoms or Love, Simon...