|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
|Terry Serres| Lou Andreas Sand (Faye Dunaway) is a former fashion model, retired after a nervous breakdown. Still vain and insecure, we find her holed up in her beachside aerie, where she is interviewed at length by a collaborator from her heyday, the photographer Aaron Reinhardt… 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
|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| This review contains spoilers. In our modern media landscape, where TV and the movies are slowly dissolving into a giant video stream, we might not recall that 70 years ago these two media were starkly distinguished. Movies were prestigious, a serious art form, and television was… Continue reading
| Jake Rudegeair | Prepare to have your heart curdled and pressed. Prepare to have your nervous system rattled like a corpse-black skeleton in a crossroads cage. Elem Klimov’s last masterpiece COME AND SEE is cinema in the raw. It’s caustic, an aching descent into the ugliest, most engrossing… Continue reading
| Chris Polley | I barely understood what a lawyer was as a teen in the 90s. I especially never thought I’d end up marrying one. The major reference points I had were all from TV and movies: I loyally watched The Practice even as ABC kept messing with its time slot… Continue reading
| Matthew Christensen | Twelve years ago, I was living in my parents’ basement. I was 44 and living in my parents’ basement. It was not a great moment for me. I had come back to the Twin Cities after a very fulfilling four years teaching at a high school in Turkey, a place whose… 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
|Dan McCabe| For better or worse, the Western is the quintessential American myth from its beginnings with The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. During the Western’s heyday in the first half of the 1900s, the nineteenth… Continue reading
|Kit Stookey| When I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I treated it like a horror movie, viewing parts of it between just-parted fingers. It was film as punishment. I had made my partner watch Shiva, Baby and experience all of its Gen-Z Jewish awkwardness. Now, he wanted to show… Continue reading
| MH Rowe | It qualifies neither as an obscure bit of Hollywood trivia nor as a famous declaration of aesthetic taste, but you may or may not happen to know that the director Paul Thomas Anderson once went on at length in an interview… Continue reading
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| “You know how you get rid of crabs? You got to shave one testicle. All the crabs go over to the other testicle, you got to light the hair on fire on that one. When they all go scurrying out, you take an ice pick and you fucking stab every single last one of them!”… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| Like many self-described “film nerds”, I grew up with a great admiration for the work of Billy Wilder. Around the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was watching Sunset Boulevard monthly, completely enraptured by the witty dialogue, the strangeness of it… Continue reading
| Dan McCabe | Baz Luhrmann isn’t your typical “great” filmmaker. His style hits audiences like a jackhammer. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is technically a period drama, but you could be forgiven for thinking the period was the 1990s and not the 1890s… Continue reading
|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| I saw the “Lady Marmalade” music video before I saw Moulin Rouge!. Performed by a hot quintet of pop-singing ladies (Missy Elliot, who I admired for smooth dance moves; Christina Aguilera, entering her exciting dirty grrrl phase; P!nk, a tomboy role model;… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| The Others plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Director Alejandro Amenábar wrote the music for his third film, The Others (2001), just like he had for all of his previous projects. He was admittedly still an… Continue reading
|Doug Carmoody| Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault on screen. Ida Lupino’s Outrage has a concept ready-made for modern independent film glory. A famous actress writing and directing a blunt, socially aware film about sexual assault has been a recipe for several of the buzzier and better-received films of the… Continue reading
|Doug Carmoody| Cinema of Absence. Michaelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (1962) begins with a directorial confession. In preparation for a grim romantic argument, Vittoria (a young woman played by Monica Vitti) takes a moment to adjust her surroundings. She reaches through an empty picture frame… 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
|Bob Aulert| – Oscar Levant. In the realm of meta-cinematic narratives, few films have achieved the level of sharp satire and self-awareness as Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player. It’s a two hour long “Fuck You” from Altman to the mainstream film industry; a scathing commentary… Continue reading
|Patrick Clifford| “Oh man! You’ve never seen Touch of Evil?” “Oh… Man. That first shot!” “Tick, tick, tick, tick… tacka-tooka, tacka-tooka…” This was how my good friend Juan Torres introduced to me to Touch of Evil. Long ago, when we were college students in Chicago. I can still see… Continue reading
|Yuval Klein| At the Mexico–U.S. Border, gangsters and police animate a caustic criminal underbelly. The protagonist, Mike Vargas, is a respected Mexican criminal prosecutor who crosses over to his American newlywed’s home country at the precise moment of an… Continue reading
|Matt Lambert| Too often in criticism, there is a lens from the future looking back at the past in judgement. To be clear, I’m struggling with that urge in reviewing The Night Porter. The 1974 film directed by Liliana Cavani examines the sadomasochistic relationship… 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
|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
|Luke Mosher| György Fehér’s Twilight (1990) opens with an aerial shot over the forested Hungarian mountain Csóványos while an ambient song drones in the background like the hum of an airplane. On the ground below, two dark figures ride in the back… Continue reading
|Nick Kouhi| It’s easy to label Brian De Palma’s work as an extended exercise in voyeurism. But in a career spanning over half a century, the enfant terrible of the New Hollywood has transcended charges of Hitchockian pastiche with his perspicaciously (and…. Continue reading
|Yuval Klein| Three students and a chaperone at an all-girls college disappear during a field trip at Hanging Rock, an Australian former volcano that is 6.25 million years old. The repercussions and philosophical symbols entice viewers for the latter part of the film. Much of the film is… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| I first learned about Picnic at Hanging Rock from the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (which I’ve been glued to for two years) and was instantly intrigued. I finally saw it yesterday after several failed attempts on Youtube. On a visual level, the.. Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| Beware: Spoilers Ahead. Believe it or not, instead of earning money by writing for a living, I actually have a real, honest-to-God day job of the blue-collar persuasion where I recently found myself engaged in the spirited pastime of bitching about work with a colleague… Continue reading
|Michael Wellvang| There’s something about shopping that makes middle-aged men snap. Maybe it goes against the whole hunter-gatherer thing where men kill and women do everything else. There’s nothing to hunt for in a store. Going shopping implies you don’t already… Continue reading
|Bob Aulert| Fearless defies categorizing. It delves into the metaphysical while simultaneously following a plot that could neatly fit into a Made-for-TV movie. Its protagonist lives in a netherworld that is neither Life nor Death, misunderstood by most everyone… Continue reading
|Kevin Maher| I was a frequent flyer throughout my career, logging more than 1 million miles on Delta alone. There were many flights that were so turbulent that I remember calculating which would be better: to crash in Lake Michigan, hoping for a ‘miracle on the Hudson’ outcome, or a… Continue reading
|John Blair| Coming off a nearly ten-year run that cemented him as an almost-accidental blockbuster star, Harrison Ford faced the question of all matinee idols who reach the top: What now? Instead of latching on to an established American auteur for a period piece or solemn… Continue reading
