
Singin’ in Babylon
|Jake Rudegeair| As hard as we pleaded and begged, we couldn’t get mom to take us to Blockbuster every day. In the 90s, we had to rely on the cabinet VHS collection, stuffed with ancient treasures like Key Largo, Terminator 2, and taped copies of whatever dad...

I Want to Talk to You About Ducts … and Dreams
|Timothy Zila| When we meet Sam Lowry, the protagonist of Brazil, he’s flying. High above the clouds, clothed in a plastic-looking breast piece borrowed from a cosplayer’s wardrobe and feathery wings fit for a campy theater production. There is no clear purpose in his flight—

Brazil, the Ultimate Parody of the Human Condition
|Ryan Sanderson| One could argue that every Terry Gilliam film is a magnum opus—Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, even Lost in La Mancha feels like a definitive statement about human nature in which Gilliam serves as...

iPhones Will Also Be Sex Vibrators: An Ode to Little Freaks
|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...

Don’t Give Me that Do Goody-Good Bullshit (or Get Rich or Try Dyin’)
|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...

The Wang Chung Connection, or: Everybody Live and Die in L.A. Tonight
|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...

Move It, Take a Shot, Easy: The DIY Magic of Takehide Hori’s Junk Head
|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...

King of New York: In Defense of the Superficial
|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.

How Swayze’s Hips Saved America and Redefined Masculinity
|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...

Waiting for Something to Happen: György Fehér’s Twilight
|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...

Apocalypse Now Is My Cinema Addiction: Lessons In Physiological Film Experience and Coppola’s Choreography of Death
|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...

Never Get Out of the Boat
|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...