By Elias Savada. From this long ago shoot in Kasten’s home town of Baltimore, the film reveals itself to be a nimble, fleet (73 minutes) and well-crafted entry.” Mix a touch of Sam Raimi low-budget horror with bizzarro inspiration from sleazemeister John Waters and what do you get? Perhaps The […]
Miranda July’s Latest Tonic: Kajillionaire
By Elias Savada. There are ample moments of lunacy and sentiment in Kajillionaire that will provide so crackling good amusement and uplift.” Miranda July’s new film is all about hard knock lives. The Dyne family – three dubious tricksters – are trying to make it through day by dreary day […]
A Surreal Soul to Sell: Jan Švankmajer’s Faust (1994)
By Jeremy Carr. Faust submits an unnerving introduction to a world defined by cumulative weirdness and instability, where physical transformation is a prevalent force engendering the potential for change….” From F.W. Murnau to Alexander Sokurov, adaptations of the Faust legend have been cinematically rendered by some of the medium’s supreme visionaries […]
Voter Suppression Strikes Back – All In: The Fight for Democracy
By Michael Sandlin. A crucial step-by-step guide to how the 1965 Voting Act in the United States has been gradually disempowered over the years.” Although All In at first appears to be just another by-the-numbers overly didactic documentary designed expressly for frustrated middle-class liberals, it would be grossly unfair not […]
Something for (Scaring) Everyone – The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film by Matt Glasby
A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Glasby’s enthusiasm for and knowledge of the genre win out and supersede any of the shortcomings.” “Best of” lists are a tricky business. Undisputed classics are both impossible to ignore and difficult to approach from a unique angle. Conversely, unexpected additions to the canon […]
Burning the Past, and the Future: Shahram Mokri’s Careless Crime
By Ali Moosavi. Careless Crime is an unsettling and dazzling achievement, using a real-life crime at the onset of the Iranian Revolution to examine cinema and its relation to reality versus illusion.” With only four feature films under his belt, the Iranian director Shahram Mokri has established himself as a […]
The Vacant Intimacy of One Hour Outcall
By Zoe Kurland. The line is always blurry between niceties and exploitation…. Though deeper exploration of themes of class, race, sex work, or, perhaps most importantly, the personas we craft to gain power, are sidelined in favor of frenetic editing.” T. Arthur Cottam’s One Hour Outcall begins with a smattering […]
She Said, He Said, He Said – Who Cares?: Yuval Adler’s The Secrets We Keep
By Elias Savada. Rapace is out for blood here, but Chris Messina is mostly a nebbish this go-round.” But the end of its tedious 97 minutes, I felt screwed while the cozy God Bless America town at the center of The Secrets We Keep celebrated July 4th, with one family […]
Guilty by Association – The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Criterion Collection)
By Jeremy Carr. Even if it’s not a true story, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – both Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novel and the 1975 film adaptation written and directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta – can only be, according to Schlöndorff, “understood out of the period.” This […]
Textbook in Disguise – The Psychology of Moviegoing by Ashton D. Trice and Hunter W. Greer
Life is Beautiful (1997) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Despite their accessible, often humorous prose, the authors never quite escape the constraints of the dreaded undergraduate textbook.” Why do some viewers flock to the latest gorefest horror movie, while others wouldn’t go if you paid them? What exactly happens […]