Wunderkind-auteur William Friedkin who stormed the Hollywood gates with The French Connection and The Exorcist in the 1970’s enters the21st century with, Bug, a film that depicts the maddening descent into self-destructive paranoia. Adapted from the stage play of the same name, written by Tracy Letts and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, Friedkin presents a noirish setting of a socially marginal characters inhabiting the outskirts of middle-America Oklahoma; which in this case is a lesbian bar and ramshackle roadside motel. Shannon, who also starred in the stage play version, reprises his role as Peter Evans, an AWOL American soldier […]
The uplifting documentary, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, follows a talented group of Sierra Leonean musicians who cope with the decade-long civil war ragging in their country by forming a band and touring to the neighboring camps to help their fellow West Africans forget their problems. Directed by Zach Niles and Banker White (and executive produced by Ice Cube), the doc was well received on the fest circuit and was awarded the Documentary Award at the AFI Fest. And last June it aired on PBS’ P.O.V. Through the doc the filmmakers follow the band, who have a Western-influenced R&B/Reggae style […]
Pierre and Jean are two pilgrims who journey from Paris to Santiago de Campostella in Spain to visit the religious shrine of Saint James. What ostensibly begins as a religious road trip becomes a scathing critique of Catholicism as told through the surreal eyes of Luis Buñuel. The Milky Way is as strong today as it was when first released in 1969 and the newly released Criterion Collection DVD will divide film viewers into two camps: those who see it as hysterical satire or those who will view it as hateful anti-clericalism and indeed, the film is filled with images […]
Watching Billy Wilder’s Ace In The Hole, which has been beautifully re-mastered by Criterion in a 2-disc package ($39.95) available this week, two things come to mind: 1) How forward thinking Wilder was and 2) how the movie ever got released. Kirk Douglas plays Chuck Tatum, a despicable newspaper reporter who stumbles upon a man trapped inside an old Indian burial cavern in Albuquerque, N.M. and creates a sideshow out of it. Though Tatum has a nose for scoops, his ego and determination to escape the desert and get back to the big city causes him to destroy everything in […]