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Posted inMovies & TV

Pavements Is Not Just A Pavement Movie, It’s All Pavement Movies

Biopic, doc, concert, museum, musical—Alex Ross Perry’s documentary contains five views of the ’90s rock band winding around one another.

Pavement has always been a band of uneven proportions. Forever on the precipice of the big time, the group never appeared to try hard enough, to want to be understood enough, and their creative output—off-kilter indie rock that sounded both revolutionary and unintentional—was always a little too much. They helped define a decade of independent […]

Posted inCity Guide 2025

Keep Portland Reel Weird

Your guide to the city’s independent movie theaters.

[Read all of the articles in our Portland Fun Guide HERE! Looking for a print copy? Look at this handy-dandy map!—eds.] At the Oscars in March, Best Director Sean Baker took the stage with a warning: “Right now the theater-going experience is under threat. Movie theaters, and especially independently-owned theaters, are struggling, and it’s up […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Film Review: Warfare Ups the Ante of Horror in War Films

Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza make us wonder: Can a war film ever actually be anti-war?

All war movies are now anti-war movies—that is, if an anti-war movie is measured by the severity of its misery. This is an unceasing human imperative in art: to showcase our species’ darkest atrocities through a transcendent exploration of the suffering those atrocities inflict, but to go even more HAM about it than the last […]

Posted inMovies & TV

French Documentary Direct Action Keeps Focus off Activist Faces

Portlanders can see the defiant, slow media movie at Clinton Street with co-director Ben Russell in attendance.

Direct Action has no characters. Someone may appear in one scene, and then, several sequences later, enter the frame again. Maybe. Direct Action never names anyone; it only shows you their hands—picking through a mud-heavy bucket, playing piano, or making a huge mass of dough, the camera locked on the pile of flour and pool […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Monkey Is a Comedy About Horror Film Body Counts

The new work from Longlegs director Osgood Perkins helps us laugh at the meaninglessness of life.

Depending on how one wants to categorize ground chuck, at least two people in The Monkey are ground into it. The first is the victim of a horse stampede, and the other becomes a meaty mess via lawnmower.  We learn about the former when a sleeping bag is casually overturned, slopping out smushed man-oatmeal. The […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Hong Kong Action Star Donnie Yen Seeks Justice (and a Fight Every 25-30 Minutes) in The Prosecutor

Cop-lawyers, brutal brawls, can’t lose.

With an almost mathematical precision to its pulpiness, The Prosecutor, the latest action-thriller from Hong Kong superstar Donnie Yen, doles out a brutal fight scene every 25 to 30 minutes. Across two brisk hours, violence shifts proportionately between bouts of athletic knuckling, street brawls, shoot-outs, car chases, foot chases, impalings, and pummelings—all spaced out evenly, each […]

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