|John Costello| I’m supposed to write about the problem with science fiction tropes—mainly space Westerns—but I keep thinking about Peter Boyle’s portrayal of Sheppard in Outland (1981). Sheppard spends much of his time playing golf in his office, looking like he can’t afford a haircut, a beard trim… Continue reading
|Reid Lemker| Let’s play a game. I am thinking of a movie…It has a bit of action, some guns, a bit of drama, and a dash of comedy. This movie I am thinking of came out in the early 1970s and stars James Caan. Our hero is pitted against a gang of bad guys, one of them wears glasses and… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| As a kid growing up at the tail end of the 80s through the 90s with access to cable and an unrestricted library card, it was pretty easy to consume the media I wanted without too much interruption from my parents. My dad was lax, to say the least, when it came to… Continue reading
|Matt Clark| The crime film and the heist picture have been integral to American cinema since its earliest days: gangster films of the 30s, noir of the 40s and 50s, even silent pictures like The Great Train Robbery (1903) still reverberate powerfully through our shared cinematic vocabulary… Continue reading
|J.R. Jones| George V. Higgins was a crime writer’s crime writer, which may be another way of saying he never enjoyed the same level of success as some of his fans. Elmore Leonard—whose fiction inspired Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), and Out of Sight (1998)—remembered Higgins… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| “You wanna hire a choir boy, you go back to Grand Rapids.” – Peter Boyle as Andy Mast, private detective. The opening credits of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore are set against a holiday scene in Grand Rapids, Michigan, filled with children sledding and snow-dusted corner… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| Hardcore is an amusing fish-out-of-water story starring George C. Scott as a devout midwestern Calvinist who must plumb the depths of the California porn industry to seach for his missing teenage daughter. It’s also a film that its director, Paul Schrader, is not terribly fond of… Continue reading
| Ed Dykhuizen | Joe plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 4th, through Tuesday, May 6th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. In 1967, American studio executives were adrift. Their main target demographic was the legion of young baby boomers who had… Continue reading
|J.R. Jones| When John G. Avildsen’s indie drama Joe opened in New York City in July 1970, violence had erupted across the U.S. over President Nixon’s widening of the Vietnam war to include Cambodia. National Guardsmen had killed four student protesters and wounded nine others… Continue reading
