The 1970s: an oil and energy crisis, numerous coup d’états (some failed, some successful), a massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, the rise (Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet) and falls (Richard Nixon) of world leaders, the beginning (Lebanon) and end (Vietnam) of drawn-out wars, and a New York-based serial killer who terrorized young adults because his neighbor’s dog ordered him to. Oh, to go back again! Stateside, the ’70s saw further proliferation of rock music, drugs, second-wave feminism, the Black Panther movement and general  political unrest and upheaval. Titled after a since-closed Catskills camp for disabled youth that was itself something […]

While release dates are often determined months in advance for a slew of reasons solely related to a film’s individual success,  it’s striking to see how some can be placed in indirect conversation with one another. I recently revisited Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s debut feature Swallow just a few days after taking in Leigh Whannell’s feminist blockbuster adaptation of The Invisible Man. Both are about women in emotionally abusive relationships that have grown increasingly difficult to break free from. To complicate matters, each are pregnant with their lover’s child, and that the pregnancy is carried out to term is of utmost importance to […]

Included in the 2010 edition of 25 New Faces of Independent Film, director Rashaad Ernesto Green has been sitting with his intricate story of love had and love lost, Premature, for quite a while now. The original short film, made while Green was a film student at NYU Tisch, was described in his 25 New Face profile as being “classically built,” telling the story of a “teenager who, having found no support for her pregnancy from either her disaffected family and brutal community, resorts to drastic, near-tragic measures to free herself of responsibility.” Green’s leading lady in the short, his […]

Bruce Franks Jr., an African-American resident of St. Louis, Missouri, grew fed up with senseless gun violence running rampant throughout his community. Inspired in part by the Black Lives Matter protests of Ferguson, MO following the 2014 slaying of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, Franks Jr. decided to run for office and was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democractic state legislator. Filmmakers Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan’s St. Louis Superman, nominated for Best Documentary (Short Subject) at this weekend’s Academy Awards, chronicles Franks Jr.’s year-long quest to pass a bill that will classify youth-affected gun violence as an epidemic. […]

Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems could lazily be classified as a “basketball movie,” which raises the stakes in the third act via a tense and deciding Game 7 in the NBA Playoffs—numerous critics cite the nail-biting play-by-play action as the film’s tensest sequence. Yet Uncut Gems isn’t just driven by the attributes afforded a fast-paced sport: the narrative’s “house of cards” doesn’t come down to a single three-pointer or clutch free-throw that rolls around the rim before dropping in as the game clock strikes zero, Teen Wolf be damned. The Safdies pull off something trickier, interlocking their film with both on-the-record, […]

Rotely obsessed with heroic Final Girls and the murderers brandishing phallic-shaped penetrative weapons who stalk them, slasher films have long been the subject of gender-study discourse and academia, each observation proving that a knife can be perceived as more than a knife, a stabbing more than a stabbing. What is it about the anonymous, shadowy male presence that feels so threatening? Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas seeks to investigate and literalize that question, presenting the modern male as someone who can be equally powerful and deceitful. What’s so scary about the fictional Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees when the world we […]

A well-meaning regional film festival can be welcoming and tightly curated—a true community endeavor. A bad one can be a deceitful scam. Such was the case with the Narrowsburg International Independent Film Festival, founded in 2001 by a couple from nearby New York City.  Things didn’t start out so rocky. After a successful first year and an inaugural picture show in the books, the husband and wife wanted to expand upon the event (and the town’s exposure) by featuring its setting and community in a low-budget indie, Four Deadly Reasons, about the mafia invading the town. Its star? The festival’s […]

The cinematic equivalent of the popular improv exercise “Yes, and…,” Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe’s feature directorial debut, Greener Grass, opens on an extreme instance of absurdity and gobsmackingly builds from there. In picturesque suburbia, competition runs thick amongst cutthroat nuclear families, neighborhood pool parties are all the rage and mom and dad travel to and from soccer practice via the tacky family golf cart. Co-starring the film’s directors as housewives who develop a grating rivalry, the film opens with Jill (DeBoer) giving up custody of her baby daughter to Lisa (Luebbe). Why does Jill do this? Because Lisa expresses interest […]

It’s tempting to sum up this weekend’s pop culture focus as rooted in chronic coulrophobia. As Todd Phillips’s Joker, the latest big screen incarnation of the DC Comics ubervillan, opens across 4,000 theaters, a fear of clowns (coupled with a pathetic lack of common sense gun laws) has collectively stricken the country. Temporary bans have been put in place that discourage moviegoers from adorning clown makeup, security amped up for extensive bag checks, and theater chains encouraged to emphasize Joker’s well-earned, hard R-rating. Has the mere thought of clowning (that is, the obscuring of identity under facepaint) brought about an […]

Starring the “bastard son of a hundred maniacs” (the horrifically burned, blade-adorned fictional sweater-wearing slasher, Freddy Krueger), A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was itself a kind of bastard son, birthed by good intentions but several less maniacs. Released on November 1st, 1985, the sequel was rushed into theaters on the goodwill and unexpected success of its Wes Craven-directed predecessor. Reviews were less than stellar, and it would take the return of Craven in a creative role to right the ship with the third entry in 1987. Nightmare 2 was forgotten and ignored, deemed an outlier in the franchise […]