IFC Midnight’s low-budget horror movies, so often geared for teenage intellects, will, on rare occasions, bound past their logical antecedent — grindhouse studio American International Pictures — and alight in the neighborhood of Roger Corman’s more illustrious New World Pictures. That is certainly the case with Fritz Böhm’s howlingly good …
A series of skits that argue against Emily Dickinson’s (Molly Shannon) having been a pompous old maid and in favor of her having carried on a tender love affair with her sister-in-law Susan (Susan Ziegler). Woody Allen goofs on writer and director Madeleine Olnek’s exposition-burdened narration and the manner in …
Six short stories, some centered on urban terrorism and/or revenge, most morbidly amusing, and all topfull of irony. It’s rare to find an omnibus film in which all of the pieces coalesce to form a unified whole, and even more uncommon when each segment is strong enough to pass as …
What must it be like for a neanderthal clone like William (Will Brittain), unwilling to so much as contemplate the intricacies of abstract thinking, to live life under the critical glare of the social media spotlight? Surely the discovery of the DNA that made possible the Xeroxing of a Cro-Magnon …
It’s happened to all of us at some point, whether riding on a bus, seated in a waiting room, or standing in line. The seemingly harmless-looking person next to you unexpectedly launches into an unhinged stream of consciousness monologue that s/he hopes will pass for conversation. Such is the life …
It took almost four hours to get through this: 90 minutes for the feature and well over two hours spent reveling in Carter Family music. Like me, if you think country & western amounts to little more than a guy or gal in a cowboy hat warbling about a truck, …
In a vain attempt at keeping the spirit, if not artistry, of John Ritter alive, Zach Braff stars in and directs this wacky-turned-sappy sitcom about parental mortality. It’s hard to muster much sympathy for a cancer-ridden grandfather who basically calls his innocent teenage granddaughter a whore from his deathbed. Mandy …
Four friends vacationing from Australia (Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price, Teresa Palmer, and Anthony Starr) party the night away at a remote Cambodian holiday destination only to wake the next morning with big heads, minus a chum, and unable to recall the events of the previous evening. It’s not an implausible …
Please excuse the disadvantaged viewpoint, but having never read Roald Dahl’s source novel nor seen Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 big screen adaptation, it’s difficult to determine how much of the dark appeal of Robert Zemeckis’ remake can be attributed to the filmmaker. The setting’s been modified from England to Alabama at …
On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese spent the last 30 minutes of her life being raped and stabbed to death while 38 New Yorkers famously exercised their rights to be apathetic onlookers by pulling down the shades and cranking the volume on their television sets. The Witness sheds precious little …
A shade of wet newsprint grey smudges the facade of the still-standing South Bronx apartment. From the opposite side of the street, the only visible sign of life in the tenement is a faint glow coming from inside a center-frame window. A cut whisks us behind locked doors, where intense …
Martin Scorsese’s latest, most outrageous essay on common denominators living the life of upscale, drug-enhanced, and power-infested businessmen to the manner born. Set to the tune of metronome camera moves, protagonist and unrepentant jerk Jordan Belfort’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) first day on the job in a strip-mall penny-stock shithole finds him …
It’s cinema as anthropology in what can only be described as a true American horror story. Wanting nothing more than to shelter their brood from the perils of a society gone mad, a domineering father and his acquiescent spouse imprison the kids, raising them on a steady diet of Hollywood …
For filmmaker Benedikt Erlingsson, it was just as easy to put an entertaining spin on this radical yarn about a female eco-terrorist as it would have been to follow a more traditional, message-laden path. (The first word spoken here is “Woman,” and it’s the name of a dog.) Whether you’re …
Harvey Weinstein continues to pan for Holocaust gold with this fact-fueled, remedially-chronicled — vibrant colors = present day/achromatic tones = flashback — extermination of an otherwise fascinating historical footnote. With Streisand and Rogen unavailable, Helen Mirren assumes the role of the feisty octogenarian who, along with her young lawyer (mayo-man …