Original Cinemaniac

Movies

Queer

            “I’m not queer- I’m disembodied,” says Eugene (Drew Starkey) to William Lee (Daniel Craig) as they are hallucinating like crazy in the jungle under the influence a native drug called “yage.” Luca Guadagnino’s transcendent film adaptation is from a William…
Read more

High Tide

            Out in theaters now is an absolute gem of a film- director Marco Calvani’s High Tide. It stars Marco Pigossi as Lourenço, a gay Brazilian on a work permit in the country, living in Provincetown in the guest house of…
Read more

Cuckoo

            Cuckoo is writer/director Tilman Singer’s appropriately titled, defiantly bizarre, enjoyably unhinged horror film. An unhappy teenage girl- 17-year-old Gretchen (scrappy, sensational Hunter Schafer), is begrudgingly uprooted from America and forced to move with her architect father (Marton Csokas) to a…
Read more

Sebastian

            A smart, sexy and soulful portrait of Max (Ruaridh Mollica), a good-looking young writer working for a magazine and living in London. He also secretly sidelines as a sex worker, chronicling each sordid encounter as chapters in a proposed novel. …
Read more

Longlegs

            This subversively disturbing chiller by Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) is about Lee Harker, a haunted, rookie FBI agent (sensational Maika Monroe), with possible psychic abilities, on the hunt for a frightening serial killer who calls himself “Longlegs.” The fiend…
Read more

The Sublime Eleanor Powell

            Fayard Nicholas (of the legendary Nicholas Brothers dancing duo) said about dancer Eleanor Powell (dubbed the “Queen of tap”), “Eleanor Powell was one of the greatest, period, bar none. Not only one of the greatest women- one of the greatest,…
Read more

Infested

            Alright, I admit I am fearful of spiders. I understand their importance in the ecological chain of things. And their webs are a thing of beauty. But if I ever see an eight-legged critter skitter across the kitchen floor my…
Read more

Femme

            Spellbinding, superbly acted, tale of queer revenge, expertly directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.             Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is a black performance artist in a London gay club. His drag attire gets him savagely beat up by a…
Read more

When Evil Lurks

            It’s ironic that the talk this weekend is the opening of The Exorcist: Believer, when the really brilliant, nightmarish film about demonic possession is also premiering- When Evil Lurks by the Argentine director Demian Rugna.             Demian Rugna’s previous film- Terrified–…
Read more

Winter Kills at the Film Forum

            Winter Kills is a brilliant 1979 paranoid political thriller by novice director William Richert, which got great reviews but was pulled from theaters after a short run. It also has garnered a well-deserved cult following.             Jeff Bridges plays the brother of an assassinated…
Read more