|Courtney Kowalke| For the past year, I’ve had Umberto Eco’s essay “Ur-Fascism” open in a tab in Firefox on my phone. Going about my daily life the way I did prior to 2025 has me feeling wrong-footed. I feel like a foreigner on earth, like the world… Continue reading
| Wil McMillen | It’s astonishing to realize now, but Anthony Perkins wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor for his role as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s cultural earthquake Psycho. Horror films rarely get the attention they deserve, but one would expect… Continue reading
| Matthew Tchepikova-Treon | Her hands were on my shoulders, perhaps even clasped lightly behind my neck. I can’t remember for sure, all those middle school dances, so uneventful yet monumental at the same time. The sense memories slowly slip out of focus over the years… Continue reading
| Matthew Tchepikova-Treon | Have you ever been hungover in church? That particular feeling is what Kris Kristofferson’s album The Silver Tongued Devil and I sounds like. Or it’s how I’d describe it anyway. Sweat, salvation, and self-loathing, but in a fun sorta way. Because by Sunday night you again remember… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| For the inaugural 1980s Action Extravaganza, three years ago now, I wrote an ode to a few particular moments from action movie soundtracks that, by sheer musical force, can compel moviegoers to exclaim aloud, “Fuckin A!” This year, inspired by… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| Bleak Week, which began at the American Cinematheque in 2022, partially as an ironic response to the pandemic, has now spread globally and is making its triumphant return to Trylon Cinema. This time with Testament, the story of a family in a small town on the outskirts of San Francisco in the aftermath of… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| Eager to celebrate Bleak Week, my favorite national holiday, I asked humbly to write about Sátántangó. My intentions were noble. I wanted to do a “Slow Looking” analysis in which I muse about the benefits of immersing oneself in the world of a film over many… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| To call a film totally immersive is to imply that there isn’t almost always some sort of invisible barrier between the viewer and the images projected on the screen. Something happens in the space between the light’s reflection and the eyes of its observer that dilutes perception to the point where even the most painfully… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Just two years before her death, Kinuyo Tanaka gave an interview for the 1975 documentary Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director. It was during this interview that Kaneto Shindō, the director, inquired about the rumor that Mizoguchi was secretly in love with her and never confessed his feelings. Tanaka, while flattered… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. The lights in your apartment are dimmed. There’s a migraine kicking in, and your insomnia is fighting the sedative in your medication just long enough to keep you conscious. You’re aching for the sweet release of death sleep—but you know that if you try to lay down… Continue reading
|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| As far as I’m concerned, every week at the cinema should be Bleak Week. Well, not every week, but let’s say maybe 40 out of 52 weeks of the year could easily be Bleak Week, and it would be wonderful, cathartic, exhilarating, moving, and maybe even sublime. I like Bleak Week, and bleak movies in general, for mostly… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| I love both David Fincher movies and movies about tracking and apprehending serial killers. I also love a good true crime doc. My Netflix recently watched is filled to the brim with multi-episode rundowns of both the most well-known offenders as well as the bizarre… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddiough| The Terminator isn’t a very horny film, unless you’re into feathered mullets and homicidal Austrians. But inside this ‘80s action thriller lives a love story, and not one, but two, very weird sex scenes. That’s enough to catapult it into a genre I call “cyberspunk.” When The Terminator begins, our protagonist… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| Memories of Deep Blue Sea’s initial release still stick with me even though I never went to see it. I remember the smart shark gimmick and Samuel L. Jackson yelling, “Just what the hell did you do to those sharks!” in the trailer. I also remember… Continue reading
|Wil McMillen| Network plays in at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 27th, through Sunday, March 29th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. My first day as a national news photographer was December 19, 1998, one of the most important and crazy days that nobody ever talks about…. Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| Noise was roiling in Olivier Assayas’s blood as the 20th century neared a close. At the end of his 1996 film Irma Vep, the director of the film-within-a-film has disavowed his initial attempt at a conventional filmmaking style. The star has left the picture. The narrative is… Continue reading
|Lucas Vonasek| John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) begins bleakly. Train horns moan as they clatter along the rails, surveillance helicopters chop through the air above in staccato, and smog drapes a city dominated by monolithic buildings clad with corporate logos. These structures… Continue reading
|Nate Logsdon| On January 5, 1970, Jock Yablonski was found dead in his home alongside the bodies of his wife and adult daughter. They had been shot six days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. Yablonski was a Pennsylvania coal miner who became… Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| If you’re like me and you grew up in Minnesota in the 90s or early 2000s, then we can all agree that Gordon Bombay was the shit. I first saw the Mighty Ducks films when I was 6 years old, and I quickly latched onto the character and looked up to his methodology, and I wasn’t even a hockey player. Over time, I realized that… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| Before anything was “Lynchian,” “Altmanesque,” or “Kafkaesque,” it was “Shakespearean.” For the last four centuries, William Shakespeare’s deep-seated insight into the emotion and moral complexity of the human experience continues to enthrall audiences to this very day. Every actor… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| When I initially pitched this idea for Alien to Perisphere, I intended to write a snarky, humor-laden essay about the trope of smart women who are ignored in horror/sci-fi films until the very loud, usually mustachioed men who did the ignoring succumb to their dumb, … Continue reading
|Zach Staads| If you really want to make a statement, affect some real change and be an upstanding, ambitious member of the bureaucratic body that keeps the lights on*—you should know the importance of bureau fashion and the importance it plays in… Continue reading
|Harry Mackin| “Did you ever take that test yourself?” Whenever an institution of power has wanted to exploit, enslave, or just murder another group of people, they’ve gotten away with it by convincing everyone else that group isn’t really human. There have been… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| In 2020 when COVID-19 shut down most of our social connections, I, like many caregivers, was the opposite of lonely. While so many were alone at home, I was inundated with constant human interaction. While I had purpose… Continue reading
|Steve Rybin| Four years separate Michael Mann’s crime drama Heat (1995) and his next movie, The Insider (1999). While Heat’smonumental pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is considered by many to be the highlight of the director’s career, The Insider remains the Mann film… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| I remember when I was eleven or twelve and I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the first time. Around the age of ten, I caught the cinephile bug after discovering classics like King Kong and Casablanca but before that Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| Michael Clayton plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, March 1st, through Tuesday, March 3rd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size… Continue reading
|Elizabeth Mathers| My (unknowing) introduction to Heavy Metal (1981) was South Park’s Season 12, Episode 3 “Major Boobage.” An absolutely transcendent piece of comedy. I know others also took this episode as an entry point into finding one of the greatest animated films. Heavy Metal is the gift that keeps on giving—great art,… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| Honeymooning in order to see as many haunted houses as possible is, admittedly, a bit eclectic. Because we were COVID brides, my wife and I had to make a LOT of changes to our wedding plans, including moving… Continue reading
|Devin Warner| The Horrorthon is back in just a few short weeks at the Trylon, and once again, my body is ready to experience watching film after film after film. Movie marathons are something that you just can’t really get anywhere else… Continue reading
|Harry Mackin| The Exorcist knows you’re afraid of it from the moment it begins. Well before its disturbing supernatural plot starts in earnest, you can feel the malice Friedkin imbues into every shot and frame, like “fear in a handful of dust”… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| My first experience of cinematic horrors shattering the porcelain white purity of the holidays had to be The Nightmare Before Christmas. Six-year-old Andrew was not prepared for Santa to be kidnapped by demonic trick ‘r treaters and tortured by the Oogie Boogie Man, a sentient bag… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| The Wicker Man begins like a typical “everyone in this town is hiding something” crime story. Sergeant Neil Howie arrives by seaplane to the fictional Hebridean island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. He discovers that the locals, who seem ordinary at first, … Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| Along a ruggedly beautiful coastline, a middle-aged man dressed in an incongruous white robe struggles as he is forced up a hill by villagers who sing cheerfully, as if celebrating—because they are. The man’s eyes… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
Or did I? Do you believe everything I write in these reviews? Do you take me at my word when I mention details from my life, or is there a sliver of doubt? Do you know who I am offline? When I’m not the person behind the keyboard telling you… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| The following assertion is perhaps already an old saw by now, but still I think it bears repeating from time to time: The notion of “elevated horror” is pretentious AF. It’s a crass moniker meant to distinguish horror cinema’s more prestigious vendibles from… Continue reading
|Jillian Nelson| When Rosemary’s Baby released in 1968, conflicts over women’s rights raged on as second-wave feminists battled governmental restrictions that seeped into interpersonal relations. Birth control pills had only just been made legal. New York had recently… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| take so much pleasure in every rewatch of Rosemary’s Baby that it often feels more like I’m visiting old friends, not watching one of the scariest films of the twentieth century. I love the pink font used in the title sequence, the New York Christmas scenes, the way… Continue reading
|Zach Staads| I’ve used this quote at the top with almost no context for where it comes from or what it means. I’m not even checking to see if the person who quoted this is correct, and that this is something Kurt Vonnegut said or wrote. I quote it to illustrate how… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| For all of its philosophical wonderings, questions of morality, madness, and arthouse sensibilities, there’s something very different about Ingmar Bergman’s follow-up to the monolithic Persona. Sure, it contains all of the aforementioned heft of his previous films… Continue reading
