Near the beginning of THE CLUB, a shot rings out and the ramifications of that sound will echo throughout this quietly intense film about accepting guilt and attempting redemption. It happens shortly after a new resident arrives at a secluded house on the windswept Chilean coast where priests live cloistered an apart from the world… Read More »
STRANGER BY THE LAKE
There is no getting around the prurient interest that STRANGER BY THE LAKE evokes. Set entirely on the rocky shore of the titular lake, it teems with beautiful young men madly in lust both with each other and with being in a state of nature. It is the stuff of porn flicks and of classical… Read More »
FLOWERS (Loreak)
A sweet melancholia pervades FLOWERS. The juxtaposition of life’s relentless move forward and the cryptic nature of human identity that confounds, delights, and charms work in tandem in this quietly powerful and unconventional love story. Moving on is the theme that ties the two tangential storylines together. In the first, Ane (Nagore Aranburu) learns that… Read More »
QUEEN OF EARTH
When we first see Catherine (Elizabeth Moss), she appears to be melting. Mascara and eyeliner running down her face. Her hair dripping. She is reacting to a breakup. Badly. The camera clings to her distorted face as she reels from the news apparently just delivered by her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley) and is by turns… Read More »
EVERY THING WILL BE FINE
Tragedy is complicated. Guilt and anger, acceptance and forgiveness don’t fall into neat pigeonholes in Wim Wender’s EVERY THING WILL BE FINE, a title that is what everyone aspires to in this small but powerful tale of searching for redemption. The central character is Tomas (James Franco), a good writer with a middling career and… Read More »
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM
To see a Guy Maddin film is to have the disconcerting experience of having the horrors of the commonplace revealed. With the most delicate shifting of perspective, and by only a few metaphorical millimeters, hitherto unsuspected absurdities are made manifest, resulting in a comedy to give you nightmares, and nightmares to make you howl with… Read More »
THE CREEPING GARDEN
THE CREEPING GARDEN is a documentary that successfully challenges everything we thought we knew about life on earth. The result is both fascinating and discomfiting, not unlike its subject, the slime mold, a life form that confounds all attempts to classify it as animal, vegetable, or fungal. It moves from place to place on its… Read More »
HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN
HOWARD ZINN: YOU CAN’T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN is a robust telling of the historian’s life and times that does the spirit of the man credit. First Run Feature has re-released the 2004 documentary with a plethora of bonus features, and were smart enough to realize that the only thing better than this… Read More »
Illuminating DARK STAR: H.R. GIGER’S WORLD
DARK STAR: H.R. GIGER’s WORLD provides much of the information we would expect from an documentary appreciation in cinematic form of an artist’s work. We are given a glimpse into his private life. We are given tantalizing clues into the childhood events from whence sprang the psyche that expresses itself with such strange and compelling images; who… Read More »
Caroll Spinney Says I AM BIG BIRD
I AM BIG BIRD is a gentle, sensitive film about a gentle, sensitive man. The man is Caroll Spinney, known to perhaps a billion people as his alter ego, Big Bird, on Sesame Street, but revealed here as the creative force as both a master puppeteer and as an actor willing to bury himself, literally,… Read More »