Visitor Q dir. Miike Opens Fri June 14 Clinton Street Theater Visitor Q opens with an inter-title that asks, “Have you ever had sex with your father?” The audience is then treated to a scene in which an older man engages in foreplay, then sex, with a teenaged prostitute, and it soon becomes clear that […]
Marc Mohan
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And the Award Goes To…
The Academy Plays Fair in Short Films
Oscar-Nominated Shorts April 5-7 NW Film Center Whitsell Auditorium Predicting the Academy Awards has practically become a national sport, and millions of citizens take a moment each year to contemplate which Best Supporting Actress will be found most sexually desirable by the elderly members of the Academy. However, for those intrepid souls who persist in […]
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A Boat Called Hope
The Wide Blue Road Reels in a Fish Story
The Wide Blue Road dir. Pontecorvo Fri March 29 Guild Theater Gotta pay the bills. Gotta feed the kids. Even if I gotta blow up hundreds of innocent fish to do it. That’s the dilemma faced by the flawed protagonist of The Wide Blue Road, the 1957 debut feature of Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. Our […]
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Summer In the City
The Vertical Ray of the Sun Shines on Humid Hanoi
Vertical Ray of the Sun dir. Tran Anh Hung Opens Fri Sept 28 Fox Tower The concept of a “return to normalcy” has been a hot topic recently. How quickly can, or should, a nation and its people move beyond traumatic events to an appreciation of what were once everyday concerns? The time scale for […]
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Mercury Video Picks
The Godfather of Gore In the vast history of that magical art we call movies (is that what you call it, too?), few can be credited with actually creating a whole new genre of film. One of these pioneers is the Godfather of Gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis. A onetime English professor, Lewis started making exploitation […]
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Mommie’s Dearest
Child-Rearing Tips for the New Millennium
The Deep End dir. McGehee & Siegel Opens August 24 Fox Tower In art, water is usually a symbol of life, sustenance, rebirth, fertility–all that kind of stuff. Limpid pools of H20 can correlate to a certain primal, womb-like environment; it’s the stuff from which we all, ultimately, have come. In The Deep End, though, […]
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Napalm in the Morning
Apocalypse Once and Again
Apocalypse Now Redux dir. Coppola Opens Fri Aug 17 Regal Cinemas For a two-dimensional projection on a flimsy white screen, the experience sure does a job of getting all five senses hot and bothered. The relentless thwap of Huey blades through humid tropical air. The metallic taste of LSD on the back of the tongue. […]
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Violence Is Like Wine
It Just Gets Better with Age
Once Upon a Time in China dir. Tsui Hark Opens Fri June 22 Cinema 21 Damn those Chinese Communists!! Oh, I’m not talking about some mamby-pamby Tibetan repression, environmental catastrophes, and/or Falun Gongings. I’m talking about the way they managed to drive practically every decent filmmaking talent out of Hong Kong after they took it […]
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Everything but the Globetrotters
The King Is Alive is the Bus Ride From Hell
The King is Alive dir. Kristian Levring Opens Fri June 15 Cinema 21 “Just sit right backand you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip” With its very first line, the theme from Gilligan’s Island speaks directly to humanity’s continual fascination with stories about voyages, voyages with unexpected outcomes, and voyages that may […]
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Punk Rock Girl
Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I Embodies the Independent Spirit
Hey you! Yeah, you there with your thick-rimmed glasses and your light meter and your Bachelor’s Degree in Film Studies! You’ve got your first feature “in the can,” as they say, do you? Is it an edgy, contemporary comedy about a group of oddball friends looking for love in the city? Or perhaps a hip, […]
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Istanbul, Not Constantinople
Topkapi Spotlights A Ritzy Gang of Thieves
It seems a bit of a shame that director Jules Dassin was born too late for silent movies. His classic 1956 French heist film, Rififi–made after the Hollywood blacklist forced Dassin overseas–features one of the most nail-biting sequences in film history, a dialogue-free half-hour fondly remembered by anyone fortunate enough to have seen the film’s […]
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Krampack, Anyone?
Nico and Dani Adds to the Sexual Lexicon
Nico and Dani dir. Gay Opens Fri April 27 Cinema 21 Nico and Dani,which opens Friday at Cinema 21, can be safely classified as a Gay Film. As in director and co-writer Cesc Gay, that is. Pigeonholing this daring, sweet, coming-of-age film as a gay film, small ‘g,’ does it a disservice. Nico and Dani […]