Browse Stories

Direct-to-video greats: A glance back at the last decade's best of the worst

By Paul Knoll

Published: 1/27/2010

Types: Screens, Video

Direct-to-video has become more than the final resting spot for movie studio bombs, sad-sack sequels and low-rent actioners fronted by bloated former tough-guys. It's also where you can find quality film and festival faves that either barely made a ripple at the box office or never got released thea...[MORE]

Death of the new: No, they ain't makin' 'em like they used to

By John Thomason

Published: 1/6/2010

Types: Screens, Film

Without the benefit of hindsight, we can only begin to guess how the decade from 2000 to 2009 will be remembered. In Hollywood, though, enough quantifiable trends have emerged that it doesn't seem hasty to label the Oh-Ohs with such pejorative descriptors as the Recycled Decade, or, How I Stopped Cr...[MORE]

Couch Trip: 2012 crackpot theories and Jarmusch tests our limits (surprised?); plus, Anvil thuds in the living room and a hot Madonna

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 12/16/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Doomsday 2012  A&E Home Video  Plucked from the History Channel's Decoding the Past series and repackaged to coincide with the release of Roland Emmerich's 2012 blockbuster, Doomsday 2012 is a compelling compendium of apocalyptic prophesies foreseeing the world's end, coming in three short yea...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Robert Redford's badass antihero and Tian Yuan's Chinese hooker; plus, Up, Lost and Monsters in glorious Blu-ray

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 12/9/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Downhill Racer  Criterion In what must be the most surprising Criterion release since Armageddon, this 1969 skiing adventure movie from the director of Cops and Robbersons must look like an oddly pedestrian selection next to the Bergmans and Fellinis of the distributor's highbrow archives. But one...[MORE]

Soft-core stocking sillies: Recommended DVDs the precise lingo of '70s tease

By Paul Knoll

Published: 12/2/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Screwballs  Severin Films B-cinema's king, Roger Corman, commissioned the Screwballs script and put up half the money for the flick's production. So dig it: The, uh, plot, is about a group of horny '50s high school boys determined to see the perky boobs of the cock-teasing Taft & Adams homecom...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Harvey Keitel's crooked cop still gets skin crawling

By Paul Knoll

Published: 11/11/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Bad Lieutenant  Lionsgate  Call them what you want — 5-0, fuzz, pigs or po-po — but the police get a bad rap. It's an honorable calling that gets little respect and comes with a built-in set of jokes — usually involving donuts. And don't look to Hollywood to dispel any stereotype...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Talking Heads make some sense; plus, Snow White gets hotter, Mara Nair rules, and Clone Commandos kick ass

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 11/4/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Stop Making Sense (25th Anniversary Blu-ray) Vivendi As soon as you wrap your head around the fact it has been a quarter-century since Jonathan Demme and David Byrne teamed up to create Stop Making Sense, you may settle into another realization: Despite the intervening years bestowing a sort of cl...[MORE]

Screaming bloody mess: Horror raver Paul Knoll offers his most hallowed of '09

By Paul Knoll

Published: 10/28/2009

Types: Screens, Video

It's time to mutate out of the saccharine sweetness and sentimental nonsense of the mainstream and get all dark. Or, um, something. Or maybe because it's Halloween it's time when a goofy B-movie reviewer gets to dress up as legit film critic and use three-syllable words? At any rate, 2009 has seen a...[MORE]

Couch trip: Gender, sex and addiction roles, those creepy flying monkeys and the Rwandan genocide all brilliantly revisited

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 10/21/2009

Types: Screens, Video

How to Be a Man  How to Be a Woman  Kino  Often, the funniest jabs in Mystery Science Theater 3000 came not at the expense of the feature-length sci-fi turkeys Joel, Mike and the 'bots were so mercilessly fed, but at the unintentionally hilarious educational shorts that preceded them. These short...[MORE]

Couch Trip: An ' unOrthodox' cop, an Alien body invader, a mumblecore mumble, SpongeBob and a season of Heroes

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 10/7/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Homicide Criterion An underrated classic from David Mamet's limited directorial oeuvre, Homicide features Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ricky Jay and other Mamet perennials flawlessly mastering the playwright's precise, staccato speech patterns. Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, an inne...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Real art damage and good fake scares, plus a few chuckles

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 9/23/2009

Types: Screens, Video

In a Dream  Indiepix  Documentaries about eccentric artists tend to write themselves, only foundering when the documentarian doesn't have the best access to, or rapport with, his subject. Being the subject's son, Jeremiah Zagar has no problems in this revealing film about his father, Philadelphia ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Knoll's A.D.D. guide to J-horror (after Hideo Nakata)

By Paul Knoll

Published: 9/9/2009

Types: Screens

Kaidan Lionsgate Welcome to Asian horror 101. And here're all the things you'll need to make your very own J-horror film (or at least peruse for greater understanding of the genre). Invent an inescapable curse for your protagonists. Preferably one that involves the murder of a cheating spouse!  ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: A narcoleptic challenger, a BBC best gets pulled, and Jeff Goldblum is Willem Dafoe's death-camp dog

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 9/2/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Deadgirl  Dark Sky Films Sex with an attractive girl with no emotional strings attached? Sounds like what dreams are made of for many dudes — just look at Craigslist. If that hot girl was actually more room temperature and discovered bound in the basement of a mental hospital, this might pre...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale are more than disco tarts, and one of BBC's best gets pulled

By John Thomason

Published: 8/26/2009

Types: Screens, Video

The Last Days of Disco  Criterion When a character mounts an impassioned defense of disco culture in the last minutes of The Last Days of Disco, it may as well be taken directly from the mouth of this affectionate film's writer-director. And Whit Stillman crafted such a perfect portrayal of early ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Catherine Deneuve ... a boy stalker!

By John Thomason

Published: 8/19/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Apres Lui  IFC Like The Son's Room and In the Bedroom before it, Gael Morel's Apres Lui is about parents coping with the loss of a child. But where those two films took approaches of quiet poeticism and raw-nerve realism, respectively, Apres Lui adopts the mechanics of a psychological thriller in ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Picture Terrence Malick directing a script by Manoel de Oliveira, or something ...

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 8/12/2009

Types: Screens, Video

The Window Film Movement The first scene is introduced at dawn, and it fades into view like an old Polaroid, slowly and magically taking shape. Shots that follow feel like paintings, and the minimal story has the epic intimacy of a great novel, suggesting depths of emotion bubbling beneath the t...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Grindhouse meets the art house, gloriously, and too many creepy children

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 8/5/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Ménage Koch Lorber In Bertrand Blier's curiously hideous Ménage (1985), sexual orientation is not as set in stone as we may think: Homophobic straight men just need the attention of a brutish, tattooed, bisexual cat burglar, and they'll be decked in drag in no time. In this awkward,...[MORE]

Couch Trip: A wonderfully creepy anti-Nazi inferno; Godard's visual treatise on morality and prostitution

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 7/22/2009

Types: Screens, Video

The Cremator Dark Sky   When, exactly, was the last time you saw a film and thought, "I've never seen anything like that before." Sure, some sense of uniqueness is difficult to find in cinema anymore, and the average moviegoer doesn't give a damn about challenging narratives and unabashe...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Quentin Tarantino gets all fanboy over pubes and boobs. So?

By Mike White

Published: 7/15/2009

Types: Screens, Film

Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! Umbrella An obvious labor of love, Not Quite Hollywood highlights Aussie exploitation films from the '70s and '80s. Short on social context but long on Adobe AfterEffects, this doc assaults senses with its barrage of clips and breakneck ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: The killer film villain you've never seen and where Ingmar Bergman is overrated

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 7/8/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Beau Geste Universal  The only reason Sgt. Markoff, the sadistic sergeant played by Brian Donlevy in 1939's Beau Geste, isn't considered one of the top 50 villains of all time by the American Film Institute is because not enough people have seen the movie. With a cruelty that almost dips into the ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: A bizarrely queer love triangle, and a horror flick so bad it's scary

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 7/1/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Le Jupon Rouge  Strand  A bizarre love triangle with niche interest, Genevieve Lefebvre's Le Jupon Rouge centers on the crippling jealousy suffered by an aged linguist and Holocaust survivor (Alida Valli) when her secretary (Marie-Christina Barrault) falls in love with her young protégé (Guillemet...[MORE]

Couch Trip: French auteur probes the mind, while a booty battle probes the behind

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 6/24/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Philippe Garrel X 2 Zeitgeist There's a moment in Philippe Garrel's I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar that I'll never forget, a single image so unusual that it all but defines the movie. While sitting on the toilet in mid-urination, Marianne (Johanna ter Steege) casually but passionately kisses he...[MORE]

Couch Trip: An epic of Dostoyevskian proportions and an eco-savvy slasher flick

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 6/17/2009

Types: Screens, Video

In Love We Trust  Film Movement  You'd be hard-pressed to find a Dostoyevskian epic with as much nuance as the quietly shattering In Love We Trust, the latest from Chinese auteur Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle). A long-divorced couple, Mei Zhu and Xiao Lu learn that their 5-year-old daughter suff...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Hunting for fascists and witches, or something like that ...

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 6/10/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Man Hunt Fox Here's a noirish spy yarn about a British hunter (Walter Pidgeon) who has Adolf Hitler in his crosshairs, only to be captured by the Gestapo before he can pull the trigger. Escaping their torturous clutches, he falls prey to a legion of fascist enemies throughout Germany and foggy Lon...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Cronenberg and Jeremy Irons, together. Plus, an anti-sunlight shiverfest and fundamentalist nutballs!

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 6/3/2009

Types: Screens, Video

M. Butterfly Warner Home Video  Released in 1993, M. Butterfly was the most commercially viable project David Cronenberg had directed, save perhaps for The Fly. The story seemed almost too prestigious for a director born of cult-horror ethos — a Vietnam-era period piece, based on a renowned ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Huston does O'Connor, Castro when he was cocky, and the haberdasher who dressed the Rat Pack

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 5/27/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Wise Blood CriterionThere are two kinds of inscrutable films: The pretentious drek that isn't worth your brainpower and the enigmatic visions that demand multiple viewings to draw your conclusions. Wise Blood is the latter. Deciphering John Huston's bizarre adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's D...[MORE]

Couch Trip: French torture, Lebanese conflict and Japanese robots

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 5/20/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Martyrs Weinstein Company You can't be in a French-Canadian torture porn flick and not be a chick with a bad haircut. That's what Haute Tension, Frontière(s), and now Martyrs have proven. Like those previous Midnight Madness entries, Martyrs is trés pretentious and trés boring...[MORE]

Couch Trip: George Lucas fans are nuts! Plus, a centerfold chick grindhouse and a musical worth renting

By Metro Times film writers

Published: 5/13/2009

Types: Screens, Video

A Galaxy Far Far Away: 10th Anniversary Collector's Edition Cinevolve If there's anything that we should've learned from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, it's that some things are best left un-revisited. Ironic, then, that this film — which chronicles the unusual species of fans ...[MORE]

Couch Trip: Full circle: Two winning Brit sitcoms want you to think they're like an American adaptation of a British comedy show

By John Thomason

Published: 5/6/2009

Types: Screens, Video

Pulling: The Complete First Season MPI Home Video The IT Crowd: The Complete First Season Remember when there was such a thing as "British humor"? TV comedy used to be a markedly different animal across the pond. The shows were broadcast in English, but it was a different language of funny. ...[MORE]