Load & Play
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Load & Play
Laurence Anyways Breaking Glass – Oct. 8 In this striking third feature from the precocious early twentysomething French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, the title character is a happily engaged French teacher, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), whose first novel is about to be published at the dawn of the 1990s. Following an epiphanic 35th birthday party, he confesses to his fiancée, Frédérique (Suzanne Clément), that he longs to transform himself into a woman and asks for her unconditional support. What follows is a simultaneously baroque and rip-roaring three-hour exploration of a touching and unforgettable relationship that also serves as a mildly nostalgic trip […]
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THE HOUSE I LIVE IN Virgil – out now The definitive American documentary about the defining civil-rights issue of our time, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In is a personal epic, a film that takes Jarecki’s relationship with an African-American family, the matriarch of whom used to be his house cleaner as a child, and uses it as a springboard to investigate the dark secret in the American heart that is our disastrous, 40-year-old drug war. Harrowing and sublime, The House I Live In is aided by a Greek-chorus-like narration from ex-crime reporter and The Wire auteur David Simon. […]
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Green Factory 25 – out now A provocative drama about sexual power play and female jealousy, Sophia Takal’s Green is one of 2011’s most arresting independent debuts. Boasting lush 5D cinematography and stellar performances, the eerie Green depicts a bookish couple — he (Lawrence Michael Levine) is writing a blog on organic gardening while she (Kate Lyn Sheil) reads Bataille — whose erotic relationship is upended when they befriend a comically outgoing but emotionally needy neighbor (Takal). With its disquieting sound design and escalating atmosphere of dread, Green seems poised to burst into full-on erotic thriller mode during much of […]
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Ganja & Hess: The Complete Edition Kino International – available now A bona fide cult film, the anti-Blacula, defiantly difficult and parochial, a vampire film in which the word itself is never used and its tropes mostly discarded, Bill Gunn’s miraculous Ganja & Hess is jolting and jagged, lyrical and mythic, as utterly unclassifiable today as it was at the time of its initial unveiling. Long lost following the rapturous reception at Critic’s Week at Cannes in 1973, where it received a seven-minute standing ovation before being butchered by its distributor into a sexploitation film and boxed up under six […]
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Load & Play
BLANK CITY Lorber Films – available now A group of artist friends make no-budget, handmade films way outside the mainstream, often acting and crewing for each other while developing a defiant, totally alternative sensibility and star system. Mumblecore? No, I’m talking about the downtown New York No Wave film scene of the 1980s, a spirited and impossibly cool movement celebrated in Céline Danhier’s Blank City. Included are scenes from pictures like Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, Amos Poe’s The Foreigner, and, from the subsequent Cinema of Transgression movement, Richard Kern’s The Right Side of My Brain. As interviewer, Dahnier provides […]
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Blue Velvet 25th Anniversary Blu-Ray Edition
Blue Velvet remains a masterpiece of American cinema – one of the defining films of the 1980s, and arguably still director David Lynch’s best work (personally, I actually slightly prefer Lost Highway, but I’ve become gradually fatigued over the years with people looking at me like I’m insane when I divulge that) – and it still retains every bit of its power today. But to have seen it upon its original 1986 release was like experiencing a bomb going off inside the theater. American films during the conservative Reagan decade were going through an awkward transitional period (and, outside […]
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“A SERBIAN FILM”
With Halloween around the corner I thought it would be fitting to write about a movie that has kept me up nights (and I’m certain that’s the same for many who’ve seen the film since its premiere at SXSW last year), A Serbian Film. The debut film of Serbian filmmaker Srdjan Spasojevic, who co-wrote the screenplay with the country’s well-known horror critic, Aleksandar Radivojevic, A Serbian Film (which is available on DVD and Blu-ray today) is one of the most despicable movies I’ve seen in a long time and the images shown will likely stay embedded in my mind for […]
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Criterion: The Killing
It’s extremely difficult to type the words “my favorite Kubrick film” because I honestly feel I could put that down while writing about any of them. But what I can say about Stanley Kubrick’s Hollywood calling card The Killing is it’s the one film of his that I’m most nostalgic about. Film noir. Jim Thompson’s words. Sterling Hayden’s “when men were men” bravado. The contract studio picture was on the way out and the New Hollywood of Bogdanovich, Ashby and Nichols were breaking down the doors. But before that (and likely escalating the emergence of New Hollywood) there was Kubrick. […]
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“BLOW OUT”
The ending of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out hits you in the chest like a hammer. It’s not supposed to be this way; American studio movies don’t end like that. But of course it’s the heartbreaking denouement that has partially helped to make the film endure in the 30 intervening years since its commercially disastrous release, though one can certainly fathom how it alienated audiences at the time (for the record, some critics were passionate defenders; it’s just that most viewers don’t savor being implicated in the spectacle of violence as it is quickly transformed into tragedy). As De Palma […]
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Exit Through The Gift Shop
A year after legendary street artist Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered at Sundance 2010, it still feels vital and fun upon its DVD release, a great roller coaster ride that is not only an entertaining mystery but a pinpoint observation on today’s art world. The film explores the underground street art scene and its anonymity, then segways into the notions of art vs. vandalism, appreciation vs. random collection, and spontaneity vs. calculated hype. When its screening was announced right before the festival, people either thought, “holy shit, Banksy made a film?!?!” or “what’s street art?” As the […]
