|Natalie Marlin| In the dawning hours of the morning, a grocer (Bengal) wakes to the still-blue fading night. The framing is methodical, delicate, but not at all static. The grocer Haruzo’s body stirs from bed, but the camera lingers on his wife Michi (Masako Motai) stirring and rolling… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Unlike coconuts, mangoes, apples, cherimoyas, plantains, and pineapples, everyone knows what to do with a watermelon. Cut and enjoy. They grow in the vast majority of the world from Sweden to Japan, USA to Chile, China to Israel. Perhaps, because of this, watermelons … Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| There’s a lot to admire about The Searchers; the beautiful landscapes, the exhilarating action scenes, the complex characters. It’s all enough to have this film continuously mentioned as one of the greatest ever made, as it should be. The first time I saw the film was just… Continue reading
|Bob Aulert| In 1966, Rock Hudson had been a movie star since the early 1950s—by his mere presence, he could generate the financial support to get a movie made AND then get people to buy tickets to see it. John Frankenheimer had parlayed solid network TV jobs like Playhouse 90… Continue reading
|Hannah Baxter| The Watermelon Woman (1996) is a movie about making a movie about movies—the very definition of meta. The main character, Cheryl, played by writer-director Cheryl Dunye, is steeped in moving pictures. She supports herself videotaping weddings and working… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| “Coming of age” always struck me as a flat phrase for something so bumpy, so relentless. It doesn’t really illustrate that slow erosion of our bodies and souls as we’re worn down by the slings and arrows of experience, cruelly and carelessly reformed over and over… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Ugly injustice and righteous anger fill the frames of nearly every fantasy revenge flick, but the best of the genre go beyond the emotion. They consider their targets and punishments carefully as well as provide a convincing argument as to why pacifism… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| A central moment in David Lean’s Brief Encounter that jumps out are these words by its protagonist. “I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” This little bit of narration is at once melodramatic… Continue reading
|Amelia Foster & Luis Lopez| If everyone has answered the desert island question as part of a misguided workplace seminar or first date gone wrong, then this John Goodman scenario can be your new barometer for whether they get a second date or you’ll be working from home… Continue reading
|Caitlyn Speier| 2016, the year I turned 16, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, and more importantly, 10 Cloverfield Lane was released to a nearly unanimous “meh, not terrible” from audiences and critics alike. Everything was perfect… Continue reading
|Steven Rybin| When a film is lost, it typically means no known print survives. Writer-director Alan Rudolph will sometimes refer to Remember My Name (1978), which he considers his best film, as lost. According to Rudolph, only one known 35mm print still exists. Continue reading
|Sam L. Landman| As he ventured onto the American Zoetrope lot in the fall of 1980, fully prepared to write the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, Tom Waits had already spent a majority of his career as an imposter. (And I say that lovingly, as a fan who’s… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| The Earrings of Madame de…(1953) may be the last great work of the French “Poetic Realism” period. It certainly isn’t the only film that marks the end of a historical era in the development of motion pictures. What interests me about it is that usually evolve… Continue reading
|Matthew Christensen| I should begin by confessing to a degree of uneasiness over my title for this piece. As the adult son of an evangelical minister, the impact of growing up in a devout household has lingered long into my adulthood. The idea of saying anything that… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| From 1977 to 1990, Robert Altman’s career as a filmmaker began to dwindle, teetering from decent-sized ups to major downs. Every other film coming from Altman was received with mixed to lackluster reviews, with some exceptions like 3 Women… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| La casa lobo (2018, released in English as The Wolf House) is one of those films based on or inspired by fact that sends you scurrying to the internet to read aghast secret histories you never knew. In this case the history turns out to be a sickening account of… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| I. Gringos en Arica. The first of my three weeks in Arica, a city on the Chilean-Peruvian border, was spent in a beachside hotel. We had free breakfast in the mornings, a pool overlooking the ocean, and most importantly, a bar just a five-minute walk away. Many of us were… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| The Museum of Home Video is an online streaming show that took flight during the pandemic and seems to have created an empire. Started by Los Angeleno film programmer/distributor Brett Berg, it takes place at museumofhomevideo.com at 7:30 pm PST most Tuesday evenings. Since its inception in July… Continue reading
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| As a pimp, the optics of being an absent, deadbeat parent are bad, but the optics of being a bad dancer are far worse—to abandon your child is your choice, but to falter in the corporeal shimmy-shimmy of a hot-blooded mambo dance… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| Béla Tarr’s slow cinema masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) is a bleak and beautiful experience. It is exactly the kind of film that repertory theaters like Trylon were designed for. During the nearly 2.5 hour run time, you can’t check your phone or get distracted by your dog; you must sit in the theater and reckon with it… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| Four or five years ago, a colleague and I went out for lunch in downtown Saint Paul. We’d started our jobs within a couple of months of each other and were new to working in Lowertown, trying to find vegetarian-friendly restaurants to get a break from bringing… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Nine years ago, as is the American way, a viral car commercial brought us all together. Advertising Volvo’s state-of-the-art dynamic steering, it showed a chiseled man in his 50s atop two large trucks, his stance wide and firm, with one foot planted on each of the behemoths’… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| In film, physiognomy is destiny. Because this is so, the face of Yves Montand is perfectly suited for a destiny shared by so many men and women in mid-century dramas, from Hollywood and beyond: being tired. The tiredness of Montand in Alain Resnais’s La Guerre est finie (1966… Continue reading
|Luke Mosher| This essay contains spoilers for the film Z. Costa-Gavras’s 1969 film Z is a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis by the Greek government. The title refers not to our English Z but the Greek letter Zeta, which protesters… Continue reading
|Alex Kies| World historian Herman Schumacher graduates from college into a shot-on-video split-level nightmare. His family won’t return his calls, his old friends don’t like him anymore. He works, dressed in a shirt and tie, digging holes in the forest. His girlfriend might be cheating… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| Toward the end of the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, set in 1985, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg visits a dying Roy Cohn, the prosecutor responsible for her execution in a legal witch hunt against her and her husband in the early 1950s, to haunt him in his final… Continue reading
|Azra Thakur| It’s hard to believe Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971) was released over fifty years ago. Its iconic first scene is still exciting to watch today: from far above, we see John Shaft emerging from a New York City subway staircase to the cold winter outside, set to Isaac Hayes’s… Continue reading
|Chelli Riddiough| What’s iconic about Shaft? The theme song. The beige turtleneck and brown pleather trench coat. The sideburns and afro. The $50-an-hour detective fee. The fact that detectives are called “dicks.” The terrible one-liners lauded as wisecracks. The unnecessary sexual Continue reading
|Penny Folger| Night of the Generals is a World War II film most people in this day and age have never heard of. It’s a joint production between the UK, France, and the United States. The story is unique in that it’s told from the German perspective, without demonizing them exactly: instead it… Continue reading
|Eli Holm| Suspended in anticipation, a man named Clerici sits awaiting his cue, a pawn of a larger game, too terrified to sleep, waiting to strike. He’s in a blank slate of ruin, without discernible emotion, putting on his mask of high-class clothing, tucking his gun, braving the winter air, ready.. Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| “To wear a mask is to literally put on a second face, a second identity—a theatrical identity removed from the everyday world.” –Lesley K. Ferris, Masks: Faces of Culture. Little soul, little wanderer, peeking out / from my body’s cover, host and lodger / which now change… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| Blaxploitation cinema and hip-hop developed in tandem throughout the 1970s. From Harlem to the Bronx, music technicians like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and others developed vinyl scratching and sampling techniques… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| Where would movies be without music? Even in the silent era, movie theaters had a pianist on hand to provide accompaniment. Since the advent of “talking pictures,” music of some sort—whether it be a full score or contemporary tracks either licensed or custom-written… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| The radical conservative is capable of some of the best science-fiction known to mankind. The evidence has never been clearer than in the wake of the Trump administration and the recent COVID pandemic that saw people avoiding the Coronavirus vaccines Continue reading
|Liz Robau| King Henry is married to Queen Eleanor, with whom he had Richard, Geoffrey, and Johnny.
Richard, Geoffrey, or Johnny might soon be wed to Alais. Alais is the elder half-sister of French King Philip. King Philip is the son of dead King Louis. King Louis was married some… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| Do you have strong opinions about subtitles? Do words and phrases like “revisionist,” “mise en scène,” and “pre-code” frequently pop up in your conversations? Can you correctly pronounce Krzystof Kieślowski? If you answered yes to those questions… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| I have spent an embarrassing amount of time being mad about vampires, and this piece is proof that I need to have my writing platform removed immediately.
Arrebató is a fantastic film. In his final, career-killing movie, Ivan Zulueta spins an incredible tale… Continue reading
|Becky Welander| I’ve been interested in fashion for as long as I can remember.
I grew up in a very small town in Southeastern Minnesota in the 1970s and 80s, where I spent much of my childhood dreaming of escaping to bigger, fashionable locales such as New York, Paris, and London. Continue reading
| Daniel Lawrence Aufmann | Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate screens at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 28 to Sunday, January 30. For more information, see the program notes at the bottom of this post. For tickets, scroll to the bottom of this page or visit trylon.org. What images… Continue reading
