Sure, high school reunions can be a chance to reconnect with old friends and share some laughs over those woebegone glory days when the sun was rising on your future. But in the main, they’re bad trips down memory lane taken by people creatively curating their lives for people they probably didn’t like all that […]
A Conversation with Filmmaker John W Kim About His New Comedy “Reunion” Read More »
Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film Harlan County, USA, chronicling the literal life-or-death effort to establish a coal miners’ union in rural Kentucky, is a masterpiece of documentary cinema. It’s human and humane and, despite its age, crackles with the urgency of collectivism and class consciousness. So monumental is the film that her follow-up feature—American Dream from
FILM Barbara Kopple’s Documentary “American Dream” Saw It All Coming Read More »
Walt Disney’s 1952 film “Fantasia,” a 125-minute abstract interplay between classical music and modern animation, opens with musicians tuning up, silhouetted against a regal blue background. The owlish critic and composer Deems Taylor, in a white-tie tux, introduces us to the proceedings with a mix of cheer and gravitas, before giving way to conductor Leopold
FILM: “Allegro Non Troppo” is a savagely entertaining comix fantasia at Disney’s expense Read More »
One of the best cinema publications out there is Cashiers du Cinema. No, no – not the magazine that gave us Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and the French New Wave. That’s Cahiers du Cinema. But the confusion is understandable, at least at a passing glance. Both Cashiers and ‘60s-era Cahiers are similar formats and designs,
Nostalgia slop, from AI-generated trash to IP-leveraging franchise flicks, is belched out so regularly our culture practically runs on the stuff. From the outside, Obex, Albert Birney’s lo-fi, black-and-white ‘80s-set 90-minute valentine to pre-Internet culture, might be mistaken for more of the same, albeit in an indie vein, especially with a press pitch that insists the
Film Review: “Obex” is the Surreal “Tron” Clone David Lynch Never Directed Read More »
Kelly Reichardt might be one of our era’s most subversive filmmakers. In this attention-addled age, cinema has gone increasingly loud, increasingly bombastic, increasingly frenetic. And not just in mediocre blockbuster franchise flicks, like Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning or Tron: Ares, where you expect a certain kind of screaming antsyness; it’s found in more ambitious, highbrow films,
This is the third New York Film Festival I’ve attended as a critic, and increasingly I’ve found myself foregoing the marquee titles — this year represented by the likes of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt and Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? (and, for some reason, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere) — for the more
Film festivals love to profess their indie bona fides, regardless of how institutional (Tribeca) or industrial (Sundance) they’ve become. (The only exception: Cannes, which absolutely, unapologetically trumpets its status as a glitzy party for superstars and the uber-wealthy.) But a festival that truly embraces the DIY spirit is the New York City Independent Film Festival.
Later this month, Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning, the eighth entry in the series, hits theaters, and it’s teasing in every way that it will be the last big screen adventure for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his venerable team of Impossible Missions Force agents, among them Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg). Or, at
An impossibly fun “Mission: Impossible” comes to Queens Read More »
When the Cornelia Street Café announced its closure in 2018 after more than 41 years of operation — due to a crushing rent increase — the loss was acutely felt by the neighborhood and the community of artists who called the café basement stage home. For co-founder and owner Robin Hirsch, though, losing the place
Exiled Off Cornelia Street Read More »
