By Paul Knoll
Published: 11/11/2009
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]
Published: 11/4/2009
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]
By Paul Knoll
Published: 10/28/2009
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]
Published: 10/21/2009
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]
Published: 10/7/2009
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]
Published: 9/23/2009
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]
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]
Published: 9/2/2009
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]
Published: 8/26/2009
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]
Published: 8/19/2009
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]
Published: 8/12/2009
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]
Published: 8/5/2009
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]
Published: 7/22/2009
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]
By Mike White
Published: 7/15/2009
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]
Published: 7/8/2009
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]
Published: 7/1/2009
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]
Published: 6/24/2009
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]
Published: 6/17/2009
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]
Published: 6/10/2009
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]
Published: 6/3/2009
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]
Published: 5/27/2009
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]
Published: 5/20/2009
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]
Published: 5/13/2009
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]
Published: 5/6/2009
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]
Published: 4/29/2009
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts Koch Lorber It's a good thing Philip Glass didn't take it upon himself to direct this biographical feature; had he done that, in all likelihood, each of these dozen sections would have lasted an hour and would have featured him repeating the same sen...[MORE]
Published: 4/22/2009
Travels With Hiroshi Shimizu Criterion Eclipse Like its previous Eclipse box sets of Raymond Bernard and Larisa Shepitko, Criterion deserves countless kudos, thanks and hosannas for bringing to yet another virtually unknown director the notoriety he has long deserved. Hiroshi Shimizu ros...[MORE]
Published: 4/15/2009
South Park: The Complete 12th Season Paramount For cynical TV viewers who have already watched the creative decline of The Simpsons and Family Guy, it's not a matter of if South Park will jump the shark but when. All shows atrophy in inspiration — or else they know when to end it before ...[MORE]
Published: 4/1/2009
With the NCAA Final Four kicking off Friday, we thought it'd be a swell time to look at how Tinseltown has approached basketball. As with any sports genre, there are more bricks than swishes: More Waterboys than Friday Night Lightses, more Sudden Deaths than Slap Shots, more Major League 3's t...[MORE]
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