Many years in the making, Fire Music tells the many-stranded story of free jazz, a chronically misunderstood and often maligned expansion of the improvisatory African-American art form that exploded as a movement in the 1960s through the innovations of path-breaking titans like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. Although this avant-garde has been around long enough to become its own tradition – its oldest living exponents are in their 90s – the music still remains somehow outside the mainstream. Even this week, Twitter was abuzz over Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon’s mockery of the German […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 10, 2021Long before “fantastic cinema” became a thing, Montreal’s Fantasia already was an institution. The grand-peré of North American genre film festivals marked its 25th edition this summer, its second in this nervous and conflicted new age of hybrid online/IRL presentations, and despite the obstacles and anxieties inherent in such, the event as ever stuck to its fundamental mission. Montreal was founded by Catholic missionaries 1642, but the festival’s lower-case catholic taste is its strong suit. Even while checking off all the boxes – Russian Screen Life freakouts (#Blue_Whale), Japanese stop-motion cyber-horror (Junk Head), revivals of obscure Swiss mid-60s spy thrillers […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 8, 2021Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
by Steve Dollar on Jun 23, 2021Real-life film festivals are back! Or so I hear. After its 2020 plans for public exhibition were scuttled by the pandemic, the Tribeca Film Festival – sorry, I mean “Tribeca Festival,” that increasingly problematic word “film” now scrubbed from the moniker for ease of branding – was back in New York City movie houses this week for its 2021 edition. Audiences could also take advantage of online screenings (Tribeca At Home) in a hybrid format that makes programming accessible across the country. The festival, consistent for years as a launchpad for strong nonfiction film, remained so. There were plenty of […]
by Steve Dollar on Jun 17, 2021William Burroughs’ explained the title of his 1959 masterpiece Naked Lunch as “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Director Lee Haven Jones appears to share the Beat novelist’s intention in his feature film debut (after a decade of UK television), The Feast. The Welsh-language shocker serves up a stomach-churning bounty of visceral delights and/or dread in its deliberate 90 minutes, as it builds to a jaw-dropping third act – steadily foreshadowed throughout the preceding course (er, courses) of events. Yet another entry in the resurgence of the folk horror genre, the film […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 26, 2021I’ll never forget the first time I heard Poly Styrene. I was in college, hanging out at a buddy’s one evening. We were drinking beer, smoking pot and playing records. One of them was something new, a document of the current London punk-rock scene: Live at the Roxy London WC2, featuring now-legendary acts like Wire and the Buzzcocks. The songs were by turns arty or aggro, surging out of a mix that felt submerged in an ambient murk. And then this teenager’s voice cut through. Over the curdled notes of Lora Logic’s saxophone, drums clamor and the song explodes. “Bind […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 23, 2021What began as a BTS feature for a home video release of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a 1971 cult favorite about Satanic possession in a 17th century English village, premiered this week at the South by Southwest film festival as a three-hour opus on the allure and dread of folk-horror. “I started working on a half-hour bonus feature for Severin [Films] and it just kept getting really big,” says Kier-La Janisse, whose directorial debut Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched adds yet another hyphen to her endeavors as a film historian-memorist (The House of Psychotic Women), editor, curator and educator (she […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 19, 2021Chiaroscuro is as good as a drug in Bebia, à mon seul désir, the striking debut feature from Russian-born, London-based writer-director Juja Dobrachkous, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) last week, in the Tiger competition. The impressionistic drama feels as if conjured out of smoke, dead leaves and rain clouds. Perhaps more to the point, its camera relishes the contrast between the pale skin of teenage model Ariadna (Anastasia Davidson), strutting the catwalk in London, and the Stygian hue of the mourning dresses worn by the women who loudly lament before her grandmother’s casket, back in rural […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 10, 2021After so much meta-ness, it was practically relaxing to settle back in the waning hours of this year’s Sundance with a drama as solid and old-fashioned as Jockey. Not unlike The Wrestler, absent the self-consciously Dardenne-ian camerawork, this Southwestern slice-of-life follows an aging athlete – the titular jockey Jackson (Clinton Collins Jr.) – as he confronts the end of his long ride. On the racetrack, at least, although the aggregated damage caused by a series of back injuries now threatens to cripple him, or worse, if he keeps at it. Director and co-writer Clint Bentley, who previously co-wrote and produced […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 4, 2021Something about sitting alone in my living room in the Florida Panhandle, staring at a 55-inch television screen, watching actors playing people alone in their homes staring at screens, while outside an invisible virus continued to wreak havoc on a world radically and irreversibly changed from only a year ago, really defined a lot of my experience with this week’s largely virtual Sundance Film Festival. Of course, festivals worldwide have made the pivot to online presentation, and they’re getting better and better at it. Meanwhile, it’s become almost habitual to describe a film as uncanny or prescient in the way […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 2, 2021