|Ryan Sanderson| You’re Sharon Stone. Congratulations. You’ve just achieved massive stardom with Basic Instinct. Now Sony’s come knocking with a metatextual riff on Sergio Leone Westerns, the Clint Eastwood Man With No Name archetype written for a woman. You sign on… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| Sometimes, I seem to feel a gravity rise from the depths of the ages throughout the world. In myself and in others, I notice a tendency to flee from new problems, to take refuge in churches or counter-churches, to rely on what has been achieved, to be complacent, to… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| Some documentary films feel more like a document than an act of documentation. They may set out to study this or that topic, but in the end, they seem themselves like objects to study. To put it another way, I am inadequate to judge the regional history and politics presented… Continue reading
|Zach Staads| See this film. If you take nothing else from this, please see this film. There may be things that don’t appeal to a contemporary palette, and it may be considered overly simplistic or overly artistic, depending on who you ask. However, the heart, the soul of… Continue reading
|Devin Bee| There’s a great gag in the show 30 Rock where we view the world through the eyes of Kenneth, the eternally cheerful and naïve NBC page played by Jack McBrayer. What Kenneth sees is not a world of flesh-and-blood creatures, but one populated entirely by muppets— Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1988) has a title reminiscent of a screwball comedy, maybe something starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. He’s a staid account executive and she’s a free-spirited graphic designer working at the same advertising agency. Forced to collaborate on a big account… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| When Bruce Robinson was living as a struggling artist in London, he drew inspiration directly from his own less-than-glamourous lifestyle for his first novel, and eventually first film. If an artist doesn’t come from money, it can be very difficult to climb their way out of poverty… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| “Fork it!” screamed actor Richard E. Grant, in the audition for what was to become his first role in a feature film: 1987’s Withnail and I. For Bruce Robinson, who was directing his first feature film, it was the way Grant delivered this line that sealed the deal… Continue reading
|Matt Clark| For the last 15 years, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has essentially been in the Tom Cruise business. Eight of the ten pictures that list McQuarrie as a writer and the entirety of his directorial output (most of which now consists of Mission: Impossible films… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| Thank you for coming today. I want to say a few words about the strangeness of a film called The Usual Suspects, which was released in 1995 and over the course of the last 30 years has become a politely or even well-regarded classic of the “neo-noir” crime genre… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Sometimes this place feels like a prison” is a sentiment I hear at least once every few years as a public school teacher—from students, yes, but also at least twice from fellow teachers. It’s also a haven for many kids who lack stability and routine at home. And yet it remains a source of so much stress and so… Continue reading
|Matt Clark| During the 1970s peak of kung fu film popularity, films from the Shaw Brothers’ legendary studio were known for lavish sets, period detail, and often outrageous kung fu styles. Rival studio, Golden Harvest, was primarily known for promoting international sensation… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| Here is a new take from my mom on the film Shaolin vs Lama. The goal here again is to introduce her to genres she is not interested in and gather her thoughts. She is a movie “buff”, but she doesn’t venture much into genre films. Martial arts movies are definitely not her thing. She can handle a horror movie… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| Yeah guys, this film has motorcycles. And lots of other stuff too. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) is a treasure from the annals of motorcycle cinema, bent with nostalgic longing, light on its feet, washing between full color and monochrome classic. Continue reading
|Harry Mackin| Spoilers for His Motorbike, Her Island—watch the movie before you read this! We meet several different versions of His Motorbike, Her Island’s protagonist, Koh. First, we meet Koh the narrator. This Koh begins his narration immediately following the opening images of the film, when an appropriately… Continue reading
|John Costello| When a character, on stage or on screen, breaks the fourth wall and another character notices and comments, something special happens. A skilled performer involves the audience as performers in the live performance. Unlike plays and fictional films, concert films… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| Some of the best songs you can listen to when you’re at your lowest are the loneliest ones. When I was near the end of high school, I got my heart broken in a few different ways, like a lot of people do at that age, and I’d go for these long drives. Almost every day after school Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| In the first few minutes of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic, Breathless, Parisian bad boy Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) shoots a cop. The moment-as-scripted is very familiar. It’s a classic Hollywood film noir trope—the edgy criminal crosses a boundary from… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| Y’all. After, like, 25 years of waiting, hoping, dreaming, I finally get to see Tom Waits in concert! Some of you have probably been waiting even longer. Don’t worry, you can come too. Get your ticket to see the mysterious junkyard troubadour, the skid-row Cyrano, Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| Time travel is a fantasy. While time travel stories often get lumped in with science fiction, there’s not much “science” behind it. While general relativity and time dilation theories support the possibility of moving forward in time, backwards time travel has about as… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| In the hierarchy of entertainment juggling is somewhere between miming and magic outranking puppet shows but only slightly less compelling than street buskers (depending on what the busker is playing, of course). In case you’re wondering how low the bar… Continue reading
|Lucile Hanson| “How to describe Nobuhiko Obayashi’s indescribable 1977 movie House (Hausu)? As a psychedelic ghost tale? A stream-of-consciousness bedtime story? An episode of Scooby-Doo as directed by Mario Bava?” That quote is what opens up the description on the… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| I must admit to you that I know very little about the 1970s. I know that Richard Nixon “pledged to end the Vietnam War”, sending the poorest of America’s sons to die aimless deaths while massacring innocents. Black activists fought in memory of assassinated… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| The Keep was a tough sell for me, a Michael Mann fan who fell in love with him through Heat and Thief—on my first watch, I was almost offended by the supernatural plot (I’m fine with the paranormal on film, but keep it out of my Michael Mann features). Of course… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| The early 70s were, in many ways, rife with watershed moments in Black history: Charles Gordone became the first Black playwright to win a Pulitzer prize, Rep. Shirley Chisolm helped form the Congressional Black Caucus, and Thomas Bradley became the first Black mayor… Continue reading
|Doug Carmoody| The patriotic imperative to “support the troops” grew, like many other national neuroses, from America’s inability to reckon with the moral failures of the Vietnam War. To counter anti-war sentiment, the U.S. political establishment boosted effusive parades to “Support… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| 17 years ago, on a frigid night in January 2008, I was in a car packed with friends, speeding up I-29 from Fargo to Grand Forks to see a new release. We would have gone to see it locally, but the theater chain (Marcus) and the distributor (Paramount) were fighting. The film… Continue reading
|Kit Stookey| Night of the Living Dead plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. It is common wisdom that any given piece of media says more about the period in which it was produced than the period it was trying… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| I have a strict “don’t talk about people from your past in your writing, they didn’t sign up for that” policy, but I am going to break it to share that I had an ex tell me (I was an admittedly overzealous linguistics minor in college at the time) that the concept of preserving… Continue reading
|J.R. Jones| If you’re sensitive to microaggressions, brace yourself for the macroaggression of The Intruder. This low-budget 1962 drama, about a small Southern town struggling to integrate its public high school, plunges viewers into the sort of casual white supremacism… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Sometime Before 1944: The US military established a covert demolition squad that later took on the moniker “The Filthy Thirteen,” after they decided to save their bathing water for cooking. Normandy, France, 1944: The Filthy Thirteen were airdropped over the Douve River… Continue reading
|Phil Kolas| An ensemble masterpiece, where one dozen of the worst and most violent incarcerated American soldiers are offered a suicide mission in exchange for their freedom. A rotten deal from a rotten wartime government, offered to rotten men, to get them to kill the only type… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| We like to imagine that, when faced with prospects of injustice, repression, and hypocrisy from those in the highest of towers, we’d stand tall and together. We’d overthrow our oppressors by bashing them or, better yet, outsmarting them at their own cruel game… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| The Last Detail is a film of contrasts. It’s a film about everything, in which almost nothing happens—a beautiful, very funny work of art composed of some of the ugliest, most depressing imagery you’ll ever see in a major studio film. It’s an improvisational-feeling actor’s showcase… Continue reading
|John Costello| Although All Through the Night is primarily a comedy about small-time New York racketeers who become entangled in a spy ring working for the Nazi regime, the slapstick characters take moral positions for community, empathy, and democracy. The movie gives insights… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| I want to start by making it clear that I love all of these movies. They are core memories for me as a kid partly because they scared the hell out of me, but mostly because, despite losing nights of sleep, they enthralled me. They are full of rich storylines, characters, themes, and… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| If you’re going to do something really stupid, it’s not a bad idea to be beautiful. Maybe that’s how Val Kilmer ended up in Top Secret! (1984), which is both his film debut and a spoof of spy stories, resistance thrillers, and, for some reason, Elvis Presley. Top Secret!… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Adventure. Excitement. A jedi may crave not these things, but a former Ewok-turned-sorcerer just might. After Return of the Jedi delivered a triumphant finale to the Star Wars trilogy in 1983, George Lucas was not only focusing on a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark… Continue reading
|Dylan Hawthorn| The concept of melodrama has a bad reputation. If I described my sister’s behavior during a conflict as melodramatic, I am suggesting that her reaction is over-the-top and should be dismissed. Furthermore, there’s a reason my brain jumped to citing a… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| For the past few months or so my father has been digging a very large hole in his backyard. It started with some error in the installation of a rain garden I always struggle to comprehend the details of. The contractor said a previous hole that was filled needed to… Continue reading
