The Sixth Annual Hitchcock Film Festival continues at the Heights Theater with a wonderful 35mm screening of Suspicion, regarded by some to be the master’s finest (and starring the intense Joan Fontaine, and a very strange Cary Grant.) Suspicion review by Aaron Vehling. Dear Aaron: I’m getting married to this… Continue reading
Is there a better way to open our Sixth Annual Minneapolis, Minnesota Alfred Hitchcock Film Festival at the Riverview Theater than with Psycho? Probably not. Psycho review by Trylon volunteer Caty Rent. Psycho was based on a novel by pulp novelist Robert Bloch. The novel was loosely inspired by Wisconsin… Continue reading
There can be no question: this weekend’s pairing of John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China with W. D. Richter’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension is, literally and hyperbolically, the single greatest film event in the history of Minnesota. Do not miss either of these under… Continue reading
Imagine, if you will, the bastard child of the Defenders and Trash Film Debauchery and, well, honestly, if you can imagine that you’re beyond help. However, that’s what you’re gonna get Wednesday night, when Theaters at Mall of America programmer Chris Grap gets grilled on his choice by TFD’s Theresa… Continue reading
The underrated On Dangerous Ground continues our Nicholas Ray: Inside the Outsider series this month. Here we see one Jim Wilson, a Los Angeles police detective who has taken the word “embittered” and made it his personal philosophy–when we first see him here, he is in his apartment, alone, cleaning… Continue reading
Johnny Guitar review by Trylon volunteer Geoffrey Stueven. This month we’re celebrating director Nicholas Ray as an outsider, and his 1954 Western Johnny Guitar gives us a title character who looks, at least in the opening minutes, like a worthy stand-in for the director. There goes Johnny (Sterling Hayden) on his… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Patrick Vehling. Drafthouse Films, the company responsible for the theatrical and DVD/Blu-Ray distribution of Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, is one amongst many such studios that are part of a massive resurgence of amazing HD remasters, usually from the original camera negatives. Drafthouse has taken great… Continue reading
Our month of Kurosawa Sans Samurai ends tonight with High and Low, his classic film of crime, kidnapping, greed and society. One of a long line of adaptations directed by Kurosawa, High and Low‘s plot comes from the police thriller King’s Ransom. But like The Bad Sleep Well or Yojimbo, Kurosawa again transforms the non-Japanese source into… Continue reading
The birth of hip hop is a curious thing. It’s both hotly disputed (which borough ‘created’ it, who really invented scratching, etc.) and remarkably well documented. The creation of an entirely new culture inside the cultural capitol of, well, the world, created a weird feeding frenzy of lovers and opportunists… Continue reading
Stray Dog review by Trylon volunteer Greg Hunter. Stray Dog (1949), the next installment in our Kurosawa Sans Samurai series, is the rare detective story in which the lead must solve a problem almost entirely of his own making. The film follows Murakami (Toshirô Mifune), a well-intentioned rookie, as he… Continue reading
That’s right, everybody! It’s time once again for your favorite secret-awful-or-nearly-awful movie of the month, the Defenders! You know the drill: a local personality, working in conjunction with the Trylon, will steal in to the theater while you wait, patiently, and put on… what? A lost classic you’ve never heard… Continue reading
The Trylon’s celebrated Monday and Tuesday night Premieres continues its trend of masterpieces that have inexplicably failed to find a home somewhere else. We’re proud to present Indie wunderkind Joe Swanberg’s All the Light in the Sky. Local film critic Peter Valelly writes of the movie, “It’s a testament to the… Continue reading
First time director Lotfy Nathan takes to the streets of Baltimore in this documentary on the city’s infamous dirt bike gang, the 12 O’Clock Boys — a name referring to the position of their wheels as they pop wheelies. Made of of African American youth who see very few options… Continue reading
Our Kurosawa Sans Samurai series continues with one of the master’s finest films noir: Drunken Angel! Angel was the first of sixteen collaborations between Kurosawa and his pair of muses: Takashi Shimura and the famous Toshiro Mifune. Primarily this is the story of the good doctor Sanada (Shimura), the “drunken angel”… Continue reading
In Vic + Flo Saw a Bear, our eponymous heroes are former convicts, freshly released from prison and in love with one another, who end up in the backwoods of Quebec. Of course, nothing will go exactly right, as old crimes and misdemeanors assert themselves while this poor couple is just… Continue reading
The Trylon and Heights Theater’s Ain’t We Got Fun?: Pre-Code Hollywood series comes to a riotous close with a double-feature (two for the price of one!) of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers and the insane Girls About Town, directed by George Cukor. Don’t miss it! Review of Animal Crackers by Trylon… Continue reading
We’re proud to open our Kurosawa Sans Samurai series with what might be the greatest of all of the auteur’s non-samurai films: Ikiru, starring the incomparable (and criminally underrated) Takeshi Shimura. Review by Trylon volunteer David Berglund. Filled with heartbreak and insight, Akira Kurosawa’s gently personal Ikiru marks a high… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer David Berglund. All things considered, it is no wonder MGM opted to remake Carrie this year. Not only is Stephen King’s novel a heralded American classic in a nation obsessed with the horror genre, but Brian De Palma’s previous 1976 adaptation of the novel is so unique in… Continue reading
Our David Lynch: Surreal Marvel comes to a close with Blue Velvet, widely regarded as his masterpiece (among a slew of already great and shockingly original films.) Blue Velvet review by Trylon volunteer Michael Popham. David Lynch’s trippy Blue Velvet is set in Lumberton, North Carolina, a small town that’s… Continue reading
Join us this Wednesday evening at 7pm for a very special Defenders with Star Tribune columnist, Variety contributor and National Society of Film Critics member Rob Nelson. For the first time in the Defenders 2 ½ year history the movie shown will not only be a super secret, but also… Continue reading
The Ain’t We Got Fun: Pre-Code Hollywood series continues with another incredible double-feature (yes, 2-for-1!) at the Heights Theatre on Monday night. Check out the insanely entertaining Search for Beauty and Murder at the Vanities, both from 1934… and well before Hollywood “cleaned up” its act. Search for Beauty and Murder… Continue reading
Our David Lynch: Surreal Marvel series continues with a white hot director’s cut screening of Wild at Heart. Wild at Heart review by Trylon volunteer Caty Rent. Blazing fire, crutches/canes, car accidents, lit cigarettes, rape, lipstick fetish, boobies, and several passionate sex scenes between star-crossed lovers are just a few flavors… Continue reading
Tonight Sound Unseen presents Sick Birds Die Easy, with a special appearance from director Nik Fackler, composer Sam Martin, and the star, Ross Brockley, introducing the movie and answering your many questions afterwards! How do you describe this one? “Exploring the worlds of white privilege, magical realism and the apocalypse,… Continue reading
The Trylon is proud to present Sissy Spacek: Seemingly Lost, a tribute to one of the more unheralded actresses working today. Today we’ll let the late, great Roger Ebert wax rhapsodic about this little-seen masterpiece, which he considered to be the best film of 1977: “And so I descend once… Continue reading
Mae West? Who the heck’s Mae West? Really? Well, she ain’t no cancelled stamp, we can tell you that, and if you check out our sockdollager double-feature at the Heights Theater tonight, you, too, can finally say “I know my onions” about the greatest film comedienne of the first half… Continue reading
David Lynch: Surreal Marvel continues with one of the director’s most critically maligned films and one of his most lauded movies–Dune and Mulholland Drive. The first was a flop, which Lynch himself couldn’t stand, and the second was one of only two films of the twenty-first century to make Sight… Continue reading
The Trylon microcinema is proud to continue the Surreal Marvel: David Lynch series with two of the director’s most talked about films: his sole big-budget epic, Dune, and the mysterious Mulholland Dr. Review of Mulholland Dr. review by Trylon volunteer David Berglund. For many, David Lynch’s surrealist films present disorienting… Continue reading
Eraserhead review by Trylon volunteer Dave Gomshay. This time of year in Minnesota provides ideal conditions for sinking into David Lynch’s Eraserhead. The midwinter weather has by now encrusted everything in dirty shades of black and white. A lonely wind howls constantly. Cabin fever is making you tense, paranoid, and… Continue reading
This weekend, the Trylon’s happy as heck to present two films from one of our favorite filmmakers, Tom Tykwer. We open with perhaps the most fun we’ve ever had in an arthouse theater, Run Lola Run, in which our eponymous hero has to try and raise a bundle of cash… Continue reading
Who is, or rather, was Chris Marker? —Emiko Omori This is the question that has dogged filmmaker Emiko Omori for over a decade, and guides his documentary To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter, screening tonight and tomorrow at the Trylon. Omori had met Marker in 1974, after a screening of… Continue reading
In 1978, Minnesota native John Hanson, along with collaborator Rob Nilsson, wrote, produced, edited this stark, humanist portrayal of farm life and the leftist agrarian history of North Dakota. This debut film won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. Starring non-professional actors and shot in a winter even colder than the… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Patrick Vehling. There was a period in my early twenties where war films took up a large part of my film viewing, particularly films that portrayed the part of the philosophical soldier–always questioning the authenticity of war, or rather, a more humanistic approach. Definitely not the… Continue reading
The Trylon is proud to present the two finest collaborations between auteur Carl Reiner and his muse, actor Steve Martin. We present The Jerk and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid this weekend only, a rare cinematic event that will be remembered with fondness for years to come… Review of The… Continue reading
Sound Unseen returns to the Trylon with a hard hitting documentary about the music of narcocorridos: the extremely popular odes to the exploits of narco traffickers and drug lords of Mexico that openly glorify violence, narcotics and money. Like gangsta rap in the nineties, “Narco” is a movement threatening to… Continue reading
Considered a key film about the French reaction to the Algerian war, Le Joli Mai, or literally “Lovely May,” is also a tone poem for the French New Wave and many of its concerns, both philosophical and formal. The film’s impetus was the ceasefire between France and Algeria in 1962,… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Patrick Vehling. It’s been well over a decade since I last watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, so hearing the news that the Trylon was screening a 35mm print was an exciting discovery and an increasingly rare treat due to the ongoing push for DCP (Digital Cinema Projection.)… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Colette Ricci. (Before we start dear reader, I promise you: this does not devolve into an anti-corporate diatribe.) For centuries corporations have been claiming public as space their own, while the public simultaneously fights to get those spaces back. As a youngster I didn’t understand… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Amy Neeser. Lolita is perhaps the best known, but not often talked about, film in the “Underrated Stanley Kubrick” series, as it comes with a lot of baggage. This was a tough one, even for the great Kubrick–not only is it an adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Matt Levine. SPOILER ALERT–this review reveals significant plot points. Barry Lyndon begins with a killing—the murder of Barry’s father, no less, in a gentlemanly pistol duel. Observed in a static long shot that sees the minuscule characters dwarfed by an awe-inspiring landscape, this opening scene is a… Continue reading
Review by Trylon volunteer Elizabeth Doyle. The word “elliptical” has been tossed around a great deal when discussing Claire Denis’s latest film, Bastards (Les Salauds), a noir set in Paris. It is a shadowy puzzle whose dark subject will not be illuminated, at least not enough for us to comprehend… Continue reading
