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Movies & TV
Posted inMovies & TV

PAM CUT’s Cinema Unbound Awards Expand to a Whole Week of Polymath Partying

Michelle Zauner, Maria Bamford, and the Criterion Mobile Closet raise funds for the Portland Art Museum.
Avatar photo by Andrew Jankowski

Found in the wording of their events, Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) promises ticketholders to its Tomorrow Theater more than just a movie. It’s offering an “experience.”  The Richmond neighborhood arthouse (itself a revamped and rehabbed porn theater) connects local cinephiles with Hollywood legends (Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro), […]

Posted inComedy

Paralyzed By Hope: The Maria Bamford Story Is Judd Apatow’s Attempt To Make a Beloved Comedian More Famous

Maria Bamford just wants $5,000 and a banana.
Avatar photo by HR Smith

Maria Bamford has written a memoir, starred in her own semi-autobiographical television series, and spent decades crafting stand-up comedy about her own life—in excruciatingly honest detail. Now she’s the subject of a documentary by Judd Apatow, Paralyzed By Hope: The Maria Bamford Story. This raises a question: Why make a documentary about someone who is […]

Posted inMovies & TV

A Blue Heron Under the Influence

Sophy Romvari’s heart-wrenching debut docudrama is autofiction for the screen.
Avatar photo by Dom Sinacola

Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, the luminous Blue Heron, is revelatory—even as it intentionally offers no revelations. If you saw Romvari’s 2020 short film Still Processing (all her shorts are on the Criterion Channel), you’ve observed the director’s careful application of context, bringing the audience to understand the extent of her family’s grief without […]

Posted inSecond Run Portland

Second Run Portland: Reality Be Damned

This month, two theaters present surreal screening series, and Björk appears in an atmospheric witchcraft fantasy.
Avatar photo by Lindsay Costello

May Day carries an ancient connection to Floralia, a Roman festival that honored the blossom goddess Flora in early May. It’s only fitting that local cinemas would screen dreamy, surreal films this month, yeah? Two screening series at Clinton Street Theater and Tomorrow Theater wander toward the uncanny, offering opportunities to drift through the otherworlds […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Frederick Wiseman’s Close-Up

A six-day, round-the-clock film marathon underscores the documentarian’s deep impact.
Avatar photo by Lindsay Costello

“There are not many filmmakers for whom you could create a six-day, round-the-clock marathon,” said Brendan Nagle, who’s one-half of the avant-garde screening duo Spectrum Between. “The sheer volume of Frederick Wiseman’s body of work really sets him apart.” An upcoming marathon from April 29 to May 4 at Belmont’s Sunnyside Community Center will screen […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Untold: Jail Blazers Dunks on Portland

The Netflix documentary offers redemption for Wallace, Wells, and Stoudamire, but not the Rose City.
Avatar photo by Joe Streckert

The late ’90s and early 2000s were a hard time to be a Trail Blazers fan. While the team was borderline incredible and might even have won a championship—had it not been for those pesky LA Lakers—it was also an era when the team and Portland didn’t seem to like each other very much. At […]

Posted inFood and Drink

 Pipe Dreams and Pizza Crusts Will Dive into the Wacky World of Organ Grinder Pizza

An upcoming documentary explores the Portland pizzeria that may have once been the largest in the world.
Avatar photo by Katherine Chew Hamilton

Amid the strip malls and used car lots along SE 82nd, one big building, now home to Super King Buffet, looks out of place: glass walls stretching tens of feet tall, ceilings sharply sloping in different directions. Turns out these glass add-ons, designed by none other than Pioneer Square architect Willard K. Martin, were once […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Christophers Is Another Small Masterwork by Steven Soderbergh

He says his next two movies will be made with AI, so enjoy it while it lasts.
Avatar photo by Dom Sinacola

Steven Soderbergh has directed 11 features since 2017—which was the year blue collar caper Logan Lucky sprung the director from a self-imposed retirement.  This bountiful run includes shot-in-secret-on-an-iPhone thriller Unsane (2018), thoughtful exotic dancer threequel Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023), bone-shaking ghost story Presence (2024), bone-dry spy story Black Bag (2025), and now The Christophers, […]

Posted inMovies & TV

A Useful Ghost Is About So Much More Than Sex With a Vacuum Cleaner

THIS is how you smuggle anti-authoritarian queer romance into a heterosexual horror rom-com.
Avatar photo by HR Smith

At the beginning of A Useful Ghost, the debut film from Thai screenwriter-turned-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, a man has a problem. And that problem is dust. He buys a vacuum cleaner, but the appliance has some issues. At night, the man wakes up to the sound of it coughing dust back up all over the apartment […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Barbara Forever Puts the Body-ody-ody in Body of Work

A new documentary about experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer is a rare glimpse of a cinematic lesbian good time.
Avatar photo by HR Smith

To Barbara Hammer superfans, Barbara Forever may seem lacking. Where are the jump cuts, the weird overlays, the extended shots of a woman masturbating, superimposed over rock formations?  Brydie O’Connor’s documentary about the experimental filmmaker’s life is more aimed at someone with an extremely finite attention span for experimental film, even the queer kind. Composed […]

Posted inSecond Run Portland

Second Run Portland: Iranian Docufiction, Soviet Sci-Fi, and Catherine O’Hara’s Impact

This month’s rep screening schedule is stacked.
Avatar photo by Lindsay Costello

Hello, reader. I am once again requesting you go to the movies, and here’s why: This month, we’ve got Soviet sci-fi, eerie animation, and some of the 20th century’s directorial greats represented (Robert Altman, Akira Kurosawa, Abbas Kiarostami, and the list goes onnnn). Also, have you read Suzette Smith’s picks for the upcoming Portland Panorama […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Portland Panorama Is Worth the Watch

In its second year the film festival has plenty to brag about.
Avatar photo by Suzette Smith

Portland Panorama’s schedule of movies, showcases, and virtual reality immersions feels like falling down a wiki rabbit hole. You came to see who’s playing live at the screening of music videos from the Pacific Northwest at Mississippi Studios, and now you’re getting excited about a bunch of shorts by Black animators at Cinema 21.  There’s […]

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