By Thomas M. Puhr. Based on six Haruki Murakami short stories, writer-director Pierre Földes’ feature debut is an invigorating curiosity, a much-needed reminder of the emotional depths to which animation can take us.” “What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real,” a character reflects in Blind Willow, Sleeping […]
Broken Windows: Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York
A Book Review by John Talbird. A sound, focused, and thorough examination of a fairly compressed period of time.” On October 30, 1975, New York’s Daily News ran an article with the banner headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Of course, President Gerald Ford never said such a thing, few […]
The Other Side: An Interview with Sophie Linnenbaum on The Ordinaries
By Yun-hua Chen. We wanted to lean into this classic world of superheroes and create this contrast between the supposed superhero and the ordinaries, which is what this film is about – what is ordinary, what is special? And we try to bring these elements together in this title.” –Sophie […]
Beyond New Romantic: Documentary Filmmaker Kevin Hegge on Tramps! and London’s Subcultural History
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. I’ve always found it really irritating how people have this default setting to complain about younger generations, when it’s young people who cultivate change and move things forward. That idea of movement is what the movie is really about.” –Kevin Hegge A superficial glance back at the […]
Fame with a Tarnish: Mickey Reece’s Country Gold (2022)
By Jonathan Monovich. Chips away at complex meaning and eventually strikes it, despite the occasional distracting surrealism.” Country Gold begins in a reverse Wizard of Oz fashion, transitioning from color to black-and-white. The story starts with Troyal Brux (Mickey Reece), a playful take on Garth Brooks, professing his idolization of […]
Approaching the Unknowable “Others” – Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship…readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics.” Within our televised small screens and the world they inhabit, bad behavior persists in social […]
Low Cost, High Reward – Blumhouse Productions: The New House of Horror
A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. It’s this nebulous balancing act between artistic risk and bottom-line business that makes such companies so fascinating, and books like this one so illuminating.” Not a week seems to go by without a new horror movie bearing the Blumhouse logo making the rounds, […]
Music to Film Streaming: An Interview with Carl Chery on the Hulu Docuseries RapCaviar Presents
By Jonathan Monovich. A lot of times you see shows that reference hip-hop, and it doesn’t feel like it’s made by people that live/breathe it. That was what I was thinking about during the making of RapCaviar Presents and was something that was constantly top of mind. We set out […]
Don’t Let It Drain – Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
By Matthew Sorrento. Just what the pinball tribe needs, and offers a whole lot for feel-good indie fans, too.” This new release, aptly titled Pinball, celebrates the game, its ignored legacy, along with an important page in its history. Those (mostly older) who sing the famous hit from Tommy do […]
The Lost Burlesque Auteur: The Films of Lillian Hunt
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. What remains so striking about Hunt’s films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male.” While American burlesque cinema flourished in popularity during in the 1940s and 1950s, […]