Forty years and numerous sequels and/or reboots have passed, and there’s not a moment in any of them to rival the slow thrust of steadicam butterflies at play in John Carpenter’s original. The well-ordered stalking and resultant butchery of a pair of morbidly obsessed fanboy and fangirl public radio podcasters …
Romantic comedy/drama begins with an coincidental New Year's Eve encounter between a former student and a professor who's at a crossroads in his life.
Rupert Everett directs, writes, and stars in the story of writer and bon vivant par excellence Oscar Wilde’s precipitous decline — healthwise and otherwise — following his release from two years’ hard labor in prison for the shocking (shocking) crime of sodomy. Everett embodies Wilde as a magnificent ruin, broken …
The violence in animation maverick Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 apocalyptic fantasy Wizards could be interpreted as the director’s excuse to get even with TerryToons for all the cute, cuddly creatures he was obliged to draw while under contract with the cartoon studio. Not surprisingly, audiences stayed home in droves. Even today, …
When Harry met Meghan.
An African-American student's beliefs are rattled to the core when she witnesses her best friend gunned down by a cop. George Tillman Jr. (Barbershop, Notorious) directs.
A fairy tale for grownups? A grown-up fairy tale? Either way, don’t be fooled: the setting of writer-director Brett Haley’s father-daughter dramedy — a failing vinyl record store in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, with frequent stops at a local bar that stays in busi-ness thanks to its reputed “authenticity” — …
Writer-director Ari Aster’s debut feature is not coy about its intentions: it opens on an obituary and then gives us mourning(?) daughter Toni Collette at her mother’s funeral, noting all the strange new faces present and also, oh yes, Mom’s “secret rituals.” (Some mention should be made of Collette’s go-for-broke …
It is quite understandable when a performer signs on to star as the self-destructive, hot mess in a fictionalized biopic of an arrogant frontwoman for an out in front punk band. Think of all the center-of-attention scene-chewing it affords. To that extent, few have been pulled through the rock ‘n’ …
Before today, this sheltered Yiddisher kop cinephile from Chicago’s far north side didn’t know a Hesburgh from a Hesher. Thank you, Father, for every now and then favoring us with an enlightening, meticulously deliberated (and well-tooled) documentary. Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the biggest …
Step up to this musical romance.
Documentary account of Nazi Germany's plundering of Europe's great works of art during World War II. Wasn't this ground covered in The Rape of Europa?