SWEET BEAN is a deeply affecting tale of finding happiness by finding meaning. After watching this charmer, you might be tempted to try your own hand in creating a dorayaki, the pancake stuffed with sweet bean filling around which the story of three lonely people revolves. In fact, I defy you to resist. Cherry blossoms… Read More »
TRANSIT
Christian Petzold has done something extraordinary with TRANSIT. Using the novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, he has taken the story of a young German fleeing the Nazis during World War II and transmuted it into a universal story of refugees. By removing the specifics and setting it in the first-world present, the… Read More »
ALABAMA SNAKE
Filmmaker Theo Love wisely begins ALABAMA SNAKE with the only part of this lurid tale of religion, sex, and booze that is not in dispute. That would be when two paramedics drive down a dark country road, on October 4, 1991, sirens and flashing lights off, only to find Darlene Summerford stumbling towards them, clutching… Read More »
BELUSHI
Click here for the flashback interview with RJ Cutler for THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE. Early on in R.J. Cutler’s documentary, BELUSHI, Harold Ramis talks about John Belushi’s enormous appetites for everything. It would be his downfall, the appetite for drugs, that is, but Cutler smartly focuses on the other appetites, the enormous ambition, and also the… Read More »
TRUTH IS THE ONLY CLIENT: THE OFFICIAL INVESTIGATION OF THE MURDER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
Full disclosure. I spend every November 22nd watching Oliver Stone’s JFK. Partly because it is so visually arresting, partly for the compelling story, and partly for the nostalgia I have for my childhood home of New Orleans. It doesn’t matter that I knew even before first seeing it that Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner in full… Read More »
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
It’s possible that a working knowledge of Canadian culture and politics might annotate the sheer joy of watching Matthew Rankin’s THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, but a lack of same in no way diminishes it. This rapturously surreal romp through fascism, propaganda, and the perils of love delights in its arch embrace of retro-futuristic artifice and vintage… Read More »
MY SUMMER AS A GOTH
MY SUMMER AS A GOTH ticks all the right boxes for a YA story designed to offer the comfort of the familiar in a framework that sets up a gaggle of paper tigers for the heroine (and her audience) to confront. A brooding bad boy, a dangerous bad boy, and a tempestuous mother-daughter relationship provide… Read More »
I AM LISA
One can approach I AM LISA as a very cool horror film in which the power structure is challenged by the supernatural. One can also approach it as a scathingly brilliant dialectic on feminism in several of its waves. Either way one comes away from this deliciously atmospheric, intellectually nimble excursion into lycanthropy, wildly entertained… Read More »
J.R. ‘BOB’ DOBBS AND THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS
Though J.R. ‘BOB’ DOBBS AND THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS throws in that now infamous quote from L. Ron Hubbard, the one about how the real money is in starting a religion not writing science fiction, this (mostly) playful, always thoughtful documentary is an unusual cautionary tale, but not for the usual reasons. Yes, it’s… Read More »
SPUTNIK
As is traditional in one of the more intriguing sub-genres of speculative fiction, the most dangerous monsters of SPUTNIK turn out to be the ones that didn’t come from outer space. That is the only standard trope to be found in this lean and lyric film from Russia, though, as it takes a sober look… Read More »
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