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A Gory Substance

by | Oct 20, 2024 11:13 pm | Comments (0)

Via MUBI

The Substance
The New Parkway Theater
474 24th St, Oakland

We say body horror, I believe, because we have no better words. But, as one female viewer said, is that not just every 26 days as a woman? To paint the town, or theater, red with your pain, to present the fullest, raw and exposed version of your most monstrous self to anyone in your way? Monstro Elisasue is Elisabeth, Sue, and maybe all of us, in French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s latest feminist sci-fi/horror/comedy ​“The Substance,” but it seems none of us, myself very much included, have found apt descriptors for the film that do not rely on the female body as an inherent source of horror.

October kicked off with one helluva heatwave here in the Bay, so seeking temporary respite from the raised temps and worldly horrors surrounding us required films. Unfortunately, after getting seated in everyone’s favorite cozy couch-lined venue we were informed that the AC was out. Well, too late and too bad, we were already strapped in for the ride. One of my companions had neglected to look up the film prior to arrival, so I really got a double feature — the movie we’d come to see and the wild eyes of a man confronted with unexpected ladyblood, a whole lot of it.

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Go Fish, Yale Film Archive

by | Oct 17, 2024 11:41 am | Comments (0)

The 1994 film Go Fish opens in a classroom where the teacher asks the class to make a list of ​“women that you think are lesbians or that you know are lesbians.” The answers she gets are everything from Eve to Virginia Woolf to Margaret, Dennis the Menace’s next-door neighbor. One student then asks why they are making the list. The teacher responds: ​“Throughout lesbian history there has been serious lack of evidence that’ll tell us what these women’s lives were truly about.… lesbian lives and lesbian relationships, they barely exist on paper, and it is with that in mind and understanding that meaning and the power of history that we begin to want to change history.”

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Human Animals Watch One Last Doc

by | Oct 11, 2024 4:02 pm | Comments (0)

Flicker

Are these prairie dogs wondering what makes them prairie dogs?

Human standing room only at the Cannon.

Prairie dogs have a word for​“human.” They talk about us in a language with nouns, adjectives, and variable dialects — even though, to most of us, their words sound like unintelligible squeaks.

I learned that delightful fact at the last-ever film screening by NHDocs, from a vegan advocacy film about what it means to be human in a world of other animals.

After 10 years of hosting local documentary film festivals, NHDocs held its final gatheringWednesday at the Cannon pub on Dwight Street, collaborating with the vegan festival Compassionfest to show animal rights activist Mark Devries’ movie Humans and Other Animals. The screening was followed by a Q‑and‑A with Devries himself.

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Reel Twisted: Forging Community Through Film

by | Oct 11, 2024 3:58 pm | Comments (0)

twisted arts film festival photo

Twisted Arts Film Festival
Circle Cinema
Tulsa
Oct. 2 – 5, 2024

In 2021, Tulsa added two much-needed film festivals to its CV: the all-online Greenwood Film Festival, which debuted in the midst of the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the Twisted Arts Film Festival, dedicated to promoting stories by and about the LGBTQ2S+ community. Both are still going strong in 2024. 

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Undoing The Joker

by | Oct 7, 2024 11:34 am | Comments (0)

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux
Cinemark Buckland Hills 18 XD and IMAX
Manchester
Oct. 6, 2024

This review contains spoilers.

Let’s get this out of the way: Joker: Folie à Deux is not a good movie. 

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Burying The Lee

by | Oct 1, 2024 11:12 am | Comments (2)

Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) and Dave Scherman (Andy Samberg) in Lee

Lee
Real Art Ways
Hartford
Sept. 30, 2024

Note: This review contains spoilers.

Lee is a biopic about Elizabeth ​“Lee” Miller, one of the best-known photographers of the Second World War. The movie is framed as her telling an unnamed reporter about her work for British Vogue during the war (more on that later), and follows her from the sunny days of drinking wine and socializing with her friends all the way through the end of the war and the terrible discoveries hidden within the Third Reich.

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Megalopolis Brings Arthouse To The Cineplex

by | Sep 27, 2024 1:02 pm | Comments (0)

Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis, which feels at times like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad.

The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall. 

It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?

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The Two Should Have Remained as One

by | Sep 25, 2024 10:32 am | Comments (0)

D-16, B-127, Elita-1 and Orion Pax

Transformers One
Apple Cinemas Xtreme
Hartford
Sept. 23, 2024

Transformers One serves as the origin story for perhaps the two most famous Transformers in history: Optimus Prime and Megatron. However, at the outset of the story, they are simply Orion Pax and D‑16, best friends who can’t transform, and are therefore relegated to mining for the precious resource that makes life possible, called energon. Eventually, the two set out on an adventure where they meet B‑127/Bee and Elita‑1 and other allies to find out the truth about what has made energon so rare.

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"Speak No Evil" Crosses Over From Suspenseful To Boring

by | Sep 17, 2024 11:41 am | Comments (0)

James McAvoy as Paddy in Speak No Evil

Speak No Evil
Cinépolis Luxury Cinemas
West Hartford

Speak No Evil is a psychological horror movie that follows the Dalton family on a trip to Italy, where they meet Paddy and Ciara, a young, fun couple that invites them out to their home in the rural part of the country. Once they’re alone with Paddy, Ciara and their young son Ant, the Daltons quickly discover that something is not right. 

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