Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
“What the hell is going on?” – Madison
“I have no idea.” – Travis
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Imagine waking up in some unfamiliar place, dazed and disoriented. You stumble downstairs to a charnel house of cadavers, finding one of your good friends chewing off another friend’s face. What would you do? This cognitive dissonance, this mammalian panic terror is the core of what makes Fear The Walking Dead so deadly effective, as well as what separates it from its mothership. Read More
Listen to Me Marlon opens to an analog recording of Marlon Brando contemplating the future of movies with a crude CG rendering of his face, now aged, as his mouth moves to the words spoken: words that express his synthetic representation in a place where he feels nothing is real. The tape is titled “Self-hypnosis.” One, among bags filled with hundreds of others, is Brando’s self-diagnostic foray into inner solitude, an intimate voice with rich precedence naked for the first time. The audio recordings contain his ruminations, self-reflections, observations, and personal confessions, which are spread out over a multi-textured pastiche culled together with the cooperation of the Brando estate. Read More
Everybody knows that smoking weed can make you paranoid. And anybody who’s spent much time in Cannabis Culture probably knows that guy, who spends too much time getting high, drawing weird comics and spouting weird theories. But what if those weird, paranoid theories turned out to be true? This is the premise around which Nima Nourizadeh‘s unlikely new stoner/action/comedy/romance American Ultra is built, and ultimately succeeds. Read More
*This is a reprint of our SXSW 2015 interview
For all the schmaltzy young love that pollutes our movie screens (*cough* If I Stay, Fault in Our Stars *cough*) there comes the ocassional tale of youth and young love that actually merits a watch. 6 Years is that movie. And now that it’s been picked up by Netflix, you’ll actually probably watch it. How novel! From our review; Read More
*This is a reprint of our SXSW 2015 review.
In the throes of first love, life becomes exasperatingly disoriented. We convince ourselves that there is but one person who can appreciate, understand and care for us and that that person should not be let go, lest we never experience such a sensation of belonging again. Future aspirations come to head with plans of fidelity and the person you are and the person you want to become begin to be at odds. With 6 Years, Hannah Fidell is able to poke her camera into the epicenter of a relationship at the structural crossroads of graduating from college as they differentiate the needs of the “me” versus the needs of the “us”. Read More
The Deepest Cuts is a weekly invitation into some of the sleaziest, goriest, most under-explored corners of horror and cult film online. Every title will be streamable and totally NSFW. Whether it’s a 1960s grindhouse masterpiece, something schlocky from the 90s, or hardcore horror from around the world, these films are guaranteed to shock, disturb, tickle, or generally blow your mind.
“The first phase is hallucinogenic… The second phase is glandular… The third phase is… ”
Body Melt is a delightful mix of fantastic gore, after-school-special aesthetics, dance music, and social critique of the bourgeois love of health and fitness crazes that could only come from 1990s Australia.
Best of Enemies gives a gripping account of the momentous ideological clash between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal during the 1968 presidential primaries. In a bid for ratings, ABC (widely considered the “budget car rental of television news”) pitted conservative political commentator Buckley against Vidal, the creator of transsexual literary icon Myra Breckinridge and the one person (bar all communists) whom Buckley had sworn never to appear on screen with. Read More
Greta Gerwig first appeared in film in 2006 with a supporting role in Joe Swanberg‘s LOL (not to be confused with the Miley Cyrus film of the same name). Today, her name is synonymous with a strong independent, feminist voice, her presence, one that cannot be ignored. Though Gerwig’s mainstream debut could be traced back to No Strings Attached, most probably know her from her eponymous role in Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha in which she was nominated for many accolades, including Best Actress in Motion Picture Comedy or Musical at the 2013 Golden Globes. (If you don’t know Frances Ha, make it the next thing you see.) Read More
Noah Baumbach again arrives in auspicious fashion, delivering a fast-talking farcical bumblebee of a film whose honey is sweet and sting is bruising. It’s as much a diatribe about the fickle nature of youth as it is a pure slapstick comedy, featuring a humdinger of a hipster prophet in the form of a footloose Greta Gerwig. Baumbach’s latest is also decidedly his lightest, opting for a kind of 21st century update to the surrealist verisimilitude of “I Love Lucy” or a feminist take on “The Three Stooges” – that is, it’s his brand of “But ours goes to 11” absurd. Everything he and his characters touch upon is based in reality – on someone, on something, on somewhere – but is forcefully exaggerated in its screwy presentation. As such, Mistress America has allowed Baumbach and Gerwig to craft modern day archetypes – the awkwardly desirable nerd, the college-bound tabula rasa, the hipster goddess – and mock them to high heavens in pure unapologetically absurdist manner. Read More
Meru, the new documentary by, of, and for the mountain climbers is a true labor of love [our review here]. In 2011, three lifelong friends, Jimmy Chin, Conrad Anker, Renan Ozturk, set out to tackle one of the most death-defying peaks on t he planet, the Shark’s Fin on the Himalayas’ Mount Meru. And they brought cameras in their pockets. Conrad Anker and Renan Ozturk were kind enough to take some time out of their un-relatably courageous climbing schedules to have a refreshingly un-Hollywood, non-slick chat with me about filmmaking as a natural extension of the adventure, how to make sure the cameras don’t weigh so much that the rations suffer, what most mountain movies get wrong, and an old climbers’ lifehack for what to do with that last rind of Parmesan.
