The war in Afghanistan is the longest military conflict in which the United States has been involved. The operation is nowhere near as successful as hoped, which is part of the reality of fighting a war in Afghanistan, a lesson that the Sov...
I like film festivals for a lot of reasons, but one of the best is the way films are forced into context with a number of other, entirely unrelated films. The act of watching multiple films in a day alone creates all sorts of weird unintent...
In 1985 there was a tragic stand-off between the extremist Africa-American group MOVE and the city of Philadelphia. At the end, 11 members of MOVE were killed, including five children, and 65 other houses in the area were burned down. It's ...
There were so many varying opinions at the screening of Dark Touch I went to. Flixist's pal Steve over at Unseen Films is going to compile some of the reviews from critics who talked to him about Dark Touch because they were so all ove...
I remember talking to a friend of mine about Muhammad Ali once, and he mentioned the nuttiness of the Ernie Terrell fight in 1967. About three years prior to that match, Ali had joined the Nation of Islam and officially changed his name to ...
A friend of mine who's a poet once told me that she'd never date another writer. If I remember the conversation right, it had a lot to do with sharing too many neuroses and concerns with someone, which would become intolerable; it would be ...
After the forest fires that destroyed much of the southwest this past year David Gordon Green wanted to make a movie set in the charred forests and ruined homes of the aftermath. What resulted was Prince Avalanche a film not about the ...
Even though I had issues with the found-footage aspect of Frankenstein's Army, there's a great anarchic imagination in the film, and it belongs to director Richard Raaphorst. I had a chance to sit down and talk with Raaphorst the other week...
It's odd how things work. The day after I wrote a very negative review about a found footage movie I didn't like, I wound up interviewing four of the directors responsible for V/H/S/2, a found footage movie that I did like. Group interviews...
Imagine you are in a large store and off in the distance you see a quilt. It’s an intriguing design, and you walk towards it, fascinated. It’s really a gorgeous thing, brilliantly composed with designs depicting bizarre visions ...
To follow up Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, two of the best character pieces ever made, was always going to be a challenge. Keeping that quality and that momentum going into a third film made another nine years later seemed like an ...
Alec and I didn't like the drug addiction documentary Oxyana at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Apparently we're not alone. A number of West Virginia residents are upset with director Sean Dunne and claim that he has misrepresented the t...
And so another film festival comes to a close. This year's Tribeca wasn't the most spectacular fest of all time, but it had a solid lineup and we saw some good movies. As per usual, Hubert rocked things hardcore, and Alec picked up the scra...
Here's an interesting fact: Taiwan is among the most gay-friendly countries in Asia. Gay marriage is not explicitly legal (a bill attempting to fix that stalled nearly a decade ago), but even as far as 2006, a poll of the population showed ...
In some ways Northwest could be written off as another movie about how crime doesn't pay. There's an escalation of criminal activity, there's the brief taste of a modest sweet life, there's the tragic inflation of egos, and there's a sense ...
At the end of The Project we're shown events that happened in March 2013 involving the Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF). There's a harrowing stand-off with Somali pirates just off the coast. Since the events and developments were...
Richard Pryor is one of the best stand-up comedians of all time. Whether it's an album like That N***er's Crazy or the Live on the Sunset Strip comedy special, there's such incredible comic timing in his work, and also just pure raw truth. ...
At the beginning of the documentary Powerless, we're told that 1.5 billion people in the world live without electricity, and that 400 million of those people live in India. The numbers are pretty staggering, especially when we take for...
If there was a marketing blurb for The Moment that could sell its strengths, it would probably say something like "Christopher Nolan's Memento meets Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up." That's really the best possible scenario for the film an...
Sometimes I watch a film and wind up thinking about two things: length and medium. In terms of length, I wonder if a feature film should be a short instead (and vice versa). In terms of medium, I wonder if the film's content works as a film...
Here's the second part of our interview with the team behind Bending Steel: director Dave Carroll, director of photography/producer Ryan Scafuro, and Chris "Wonder" Schoeck. The documentary was my favorite movie at this year's Tribeca Film ...
The documentary Bending Steel was my favorite movie at the Tribeca Film Festival. It follows Chris "Wonder" Schoeck in his quest to become an old-time strongman, but the act of bending steel winds up meaning so much more -- it's an opportun...
Before interviewing director Danny Mulheron and actress Kate Elliott about Fresh Meat, I was talking to another film blogger/journalist about the movie. She brought up the idea of brew and views with her friends: double features invol...
Director Danny Mulheron has a really huge personality, and talking to him last week I could sense a lot of that in the movie Fresh Meat. Both he and actress Kate Elliott were in town for the Tribeca Film Festival, and the fest was just the ...
Fresh Meat is a manic horror-comedy from New Zealand about a group of screw-up criminals that take a suburban family hostage. The family just happens to be a bunch of cannibals. The leader of the criminals is a badass named Gigi, played by ...
The Rocket was one of the films at Tribeca that I'd planned to see much earlier in the festival but unfortunately couldn't get to until later. This Australian production set in Laos won both the audience award and the jury prize for Best Na...
It seems like we're well beyond the age of the public intellectual, or even the public author who may show society the way. Writers like Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, and others used to appear on television debatin...
A couple of weeks ago, the 1995 patent on the painkiller OxyContin expired. OxyContin is a particularly potent form of the opioid Oxycodone, and is intended to be released over time rather than immediately. When taken orally, this worked as...
Retro-style futures sometimes look more futuristic than modern approximations of what the future will be like, and there's a definite retro aesthetic at work in The Machine. In some ways, it's similar in style to Beyond the Black Rainbow. B...
Paul Verhoeven is due for a comeback in the United States. He mentioned at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in the week that Showgirls sort of ruined him in Hollywood, and that Starship Troopers didn't help matters either since the fascist...
Zoë Bell is a stone cold badass. For years she's been one of the best stunt performers in the world, doubling Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, and even appearing as herself in Death Proof. With female v...
There are a few common blackholes for me on the internet. I'll go into catch-up blackholes where I'll read all the bookmarked articles I've amassed for a few weeks. I'll go on Vice documentary blackholes as well, and exotic pet video blackh...
Run and Jump features a bit of semi-stunt casting that got me interested in the movie: the film features Saturday Night Live's Will Forte in a dramatic role. The role isn't devoid of humor, however. Like Steve Carell in Little Miss Sunshine...
Juliette Eisner and Andy Capper delve into the odd and adorable world of cat memes in their film Lil Bub & Friendz. The documentary provides an overview of the internet cat phenomenon, with special focus on Mike Bridavsky and his f...
If you're going into Mistaken for Strangers looking for a rockumentary/tour documentary on The National, you're in for disappointment. The film was directed by Tom Berninger, the younger brother of the band's frontman Matt Berninger. Tom's ...
Filmmakers who are reading this: please, just stop with the found footage already. Seriously. Stop it. For the love of all that is good in the world, please stop it because you're hurting the quality of your own work. Actually, let me clari...
I believe that the definition of definition is reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. Completely. That's how Henry Rollins begins the essay "The Iron," which is all about how he got into lif...
In my blurb review for Neil Jordan's vampire film Byzantium, my main gripe had a lot to do with the age of the main character. Eleanor in that movie is a well-traveled and world-hardened 200 years old, but she's written like she's a shelter...
Intensely personal documentaries sometimes work best when they eschew notions of reportage and simply become confessions or professions of something. The films are less like dispatches and more like personal essays and memoirs. That's one w...
There's a moment in Möbius where I expected a turn toward high-stakes adventure and evasion. As in any story of spies and espionage, this is where a fine plan goes horribly, uncontrollably wrong. People who shouldn't get involved get i...
