My Posse’s On Grand Lake
by | May 2, 2024 4:23 pm | Comments (0)
Outlaw Posse Red Carpet Premiere
Grand Lake Theatre
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Frederick Noland
Film
The Antidote To A Noir World? "Noir Nights" With Josh Fadem
by | Apr 19, 2024 6:04 pm | Comments (0)
CIRCLE CINEMA PHOTO
Forays into darkness
Noir Nights With Josh Fadem
Circle Cinema
April 15, 2024
Considering what he does for a living, it’s no surprise that actor and comedian Josh Fadem (Better Call Saul, Twin Peaks, Reservation Dogs) is fascinated by film history. During COVID lockdowns, like many of us, Fadem passed the time watching movies, drawn especially to the Criterion Channel’s film noir series and the TCM app’s “Noir Alley” nights. (“Noir Alley” is hosted by Eddie Muller, author of the essential Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir.) Fadem’s period of late-night isolation eventually led to one of Tulsa’s most beloved new community gatherings: Noir Nights at Circle Cinema.
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Pearl Jam Album Bombs As A Movie
by | Apr 18, 2024 11:02 am | Comments (0)
Some of the visuals screened during Dark Matter — which look more compelling (I swear I'm not bragging) after undergoing iPhone collaging and editing.
Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Pearl Jam fans Larry and Jen Coppertino, the latter of whom has attended 151 live shows.
Pearl Jam: Dark Matter in the Dark
Landmark’s Ritz 5
214 Walnut St.
Philadelphia
April 16, 2024
The theater lights faded until nothing remained but the pixelated heads of 60-something Pearl Jam fans, the sound of sharp, upbeat guitar blaring through a fuzzy sound system, and the internal nagging of my own inner critic — as one of the ’90s’ most popular rock bands used movie tickets to sell their latest album, Dark Matter, to the masses.
Deadpan Yoga
by | Apr 9, 2024 9:59 am | Comments (0)
La Práctica (The Practice) — the latest from Argentinian writer/director Martín Rejtman — is the story of a yoga instructor’s interactions with students old and new as he maneuvers his way through his ever-changing world, balancing humor and humanity. Presented in conjunction with the Latino and Iberian Film festival at Yale (LIFFY), the event included a post-film Q&A with Rejtman, moderated by LIFFY’s founder and executive director Margherita Tortora.
Food Flick Blows An Opportunity
by | Apr 4, 2024 6:43 pm | Comments (0)
The students who eventually join Club Zero
Club Zero
Cinestudio
Trinity College
Hartford
April 3, 2024
(This review contains spoilers.)
Food is an incredibly difficult topic to talk about. People talk about weight loss, diabetes, famine, and topics around food, but very rarely discuss food itself, outside of how to prepare it.
Grime & Crime: The Coolest Movie Ever Made
by | Apr 2, 2024 11:39 am | Comments (0)
Le Samourai
Film Forum
West Village, NYC
3/31/24
Film Forum is at it again with some truly aces programming. I’ve no doubt that the seats of this theater will remain as packed as they were for Sunday night’s showing of Le Samourai, Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece of slick silence, stoicism, and understated aestheticism.
Showing as part of Film Forum’s Alain Delon retrospective, Le Samourai knowingly bathes the audience with the real reason for seeing any Delon film — the simple fact that the man is gorgeous in a way that feels like a genetic glitch, some deeply unfair flaw in the universe’s source code. Cast as a near silent, stone-cold assassin, Le Samourai’s camera works over Delon as though he’s the true work of art: story be damned, trick-shots and interesting techniques be damned, scenery and location be damned.
Just look, eyes wide and tearful, just look at the man!
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How I Began To See Evangelion
by | Mar 30, 2024 12:51 pm | Comments (0)
Evangelion
IFC Center
West Village, Manhattan
3/29/24
(Spoilers. Etc.)
I am, with some small degree of vocality, no great fan of anime. I have a strong affinity for several of Miyazaki’s films, enjoy an episode of Cowboy Bebop occasionally, and think Akira is a fantastic piece of science fiction filmmaking. All the rest, the little else I’ve seen, I can largely do without. But Neon Genesis Evangelion holds a special, special place in my heart.
Maybe it’s the knowing and ironic style, operating with a basic disdain for it’s own genre. Maybe it’s the Christological symbolism and deep-fried psychoanalysis that underpins the narrative’s themes; maybe it’s the show’s hopeful rejection of apocalyptic nihilism. Maybe it’s that even through all the explosions, bloodshed, flat out ridiculous violence, and egregious sexuality the ultimate spectacle is one concerned with the state of the soul in relation to other souls.
Maybe the robots just look cool.
I don’t know, but goddamn, do I love Evangelion.
Keeping It Reel In Chicago
by and | Mar 25, 2024 4:35 pm | Comments (0)
La battaglia di Algeri
Music Box Theatre
3/24/24
Chicago may not be the first place that aspiring megastars think to showcase their talents on the silver screen, but don’t let anyone deny Chicago’s rich cinematic history. What is cinema without Scarface, The Blues Brothers, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Home Alone… Chicago? The city is its own star and its own critic, teeming with movie buffs.
This Is Me on Top of You
by | Mar 15, 2024 3:01 pm | Comments (0)
VAL + THE AMATEURIST
NOW INSTANT IMAGE HALL
Chinatown, Los Angeles
March 9, 2024
Getting ready for the screening, everything felt like a performance. I slipped on a pair of black leather pants and wondered if I was subconsciously channeling BDSM aesthetics — and if so, whether I was preparing to dominate (as “Los Angeles Review of Books Freelance Reporter”) or be dominated (as “audience member”). I pulled a houndstooth tank over my head and meditated on the marriage of the professional pattern and the low-cut scoop neck — a dangerous intersection of business and pleasure. In the car, I listened to Pulp’s “This Is Hardcore,” a song that casts two lovers as actor and director.
The Joys of J-Horror
by | Mar 11, 2024 11:44 am | Comments (0)
Blind Woman’s Curse
Film Forum’s Japanese Horror Programming
West Village, NYC
3/8/2024
Film Forum just can’t be beat, if I’m being honest. There’s not a week that goes by that they’re not there to provide a fantastic alternative to night in and locked away. Where else is one going to essentially stumble into a late showing of some heretofore unheard of Japanese horror film? Hell, where else is one going to reliably direct their stumbling, where else is one going to trust there would be something worth catching the fall?
The Taste Of An Indy Moviehouse
by | Mar 5, 2024 4:07 pm | Comments (0)
The Taste of Things
The Belcourt Theater
Nashville
3/5/24
Showing up hungry to a movie called The Taste of Things was both unintentional and a mistake — salvageable only through a trip to the concessions stand. Despite running a little late, I made remedying this a priority and got myself a large popcorn and a local craft draft of Jackalope Brewing Company’s Bearwalker beer before entering what ended up being a very intimate and very full theater. I was left with no choice but to sit in the front row and devour every mouthwatering visual the film had to offer from only a few feet away.
PBS Runs Armenia Through The Dull Machine
by | Mar 5, 2024 11:31 am | Comments (0)
Aerial view of Dilijan, Armenia, in documentary.
Armenia, My Home
Connecticut Public TV premiere; streaming on PBS
I guess you could say that I have a fraught relationship with the idea of a homeland.
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Con Nooga Has Fun With Coexistence
by | Feb 28, 2024 5:25 pm | Comments (0)
Drew Bunting Photos
Tanner.
Con Nooga
Chattanooga Convention Center
2/24/24
I didn’t expect to meet an exorcist at Con Nooga. But there she was: Jeni Tanner, in a homemade priest’s collar, sitting at a booth labeled “Demon Exorcisms.”
“I wanted to give people a place to write down what’s haunting them, and offer them a space to get it off of their chest,” she told me. And people were jumping right in, writing down their demons and posting them on a trifold board straight out of a middle-school science fair. A few were benign (“bad bosses”), but most went straight for the throat: “dysmorphia,” “PTSD,” “The entire B***** family,” and, of course, “Republicans.”
Joan Jett Blakk Spills The Tea At Queer BIPOC Short-Film Fest
by | Feb 26, 2024 11:00 am | Comments (0)
Breezy Bratton Photos
Panel discussion after Black Queer History Spotlight: Shorts event
Black Queer History Spotlight: Shorts
Grand Lake Theatre
3200 Grand Lake Ave.
Oakland
Feb. 22, 2024
It’s not always easy to find events falling at the intersection of Black and queer. Many praises go to the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center along with queer cinema nonprofit Frameline, and the cultural hub for filmmakers, Cinemama, for sponsoring the free event, “Black Queer History Spotlight: Shorts.”
The queer community gathered at the historic Grand Lake Theatre, which first opened its doors almost 100 years ago on March 6, 1926. Who knew that patrons flocking in to see vaudeville, silent films, and later on, “talkies,” would evolve into vibrant BIPOC queers communing to enjoy the best of local Black queer short film?
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The Tarkovsky Test: Hang In For The Long Shots
by | Feb 25, 2024 1:16 pm | Comments (0)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia
Film Forum
West Village, NYC
Feb. 23, 2024
The average shot length in contemporary, big-budget films — both your Marvel slogs and flacccid A24 pseudo-arthouse meanderings — is, by my very cursory research, somewhere between six and two seconds.
If one were to replace the images enlivened within these frames with, say, slides of alternating color, most modern films would be rendered nothing so much as strobing lights, never lingering on one slide long enough to even allow the color to register in any quality other than their constant shifting. It is, quite frankly, a small miracle that the goopy hardware in our skulls — no longer though as the mystical seat of a soul, but only soup solid enough for neurons to carve permanent impressions through — has stood up to this test, this shift in our mode of storytelling. The simple fact that we can still hold narrative cohesion together through all of this astounds me. But, it has perhaps come at a cost. And even if not at a cost, it would still very likely behoove us to realize there are other ways to experience the totalizing art of cinema.
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