The new film by Fatih Akin is based on a true Hamburg serial killer in the 1970s and it’s so outrageously twisted and grindingly appalling it’s kind of amazing. The director- Fatih Akin is a real favorite of mine-…
Read more
There’s a surprising tender heart beating beneath the deliriously violent, blackly funny surface of the exhilarating new film by prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a young aspiring boxer who is informed by doctors he has…
Read more
Opening Friday Sept. 13th at IFC Center (323 6th Ave.) is Larry Fessenden’s macabre, inspired take on the Frankenstein story which is heartbreaking as it is horrifying. Set in a warehouse/loft in Brooklyn, Henry (David Call) is a former army…
Read more
Brilliant, brutal but beautiful Australian revenge tale by director Jennifer Kent (The Babadook). Set in 1825 on the island of Tasmania, it’s about the Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict who has finished a seven-year sentence for theft but…
Read more
Movie theaters are doing it all wrong. Yes, theater-going is down thanks to streaming. But in the 1950s when theater chains were panicked about the advent of TV they came up with movie gimmicks like 3D and Cinemascope. They…
Read more
Photographer Richard Billingham made a name for himself with alarming autobiographical photos of his family- his alcoholic father and obese, tattooed mother in England. This film expands on that by plunging the audience into the squalid house, with Liz…
Read more
Director Ari Aster’s gloriously disturbing new movie is drenched in sunlight but every frame drips darkness. Florence Pugh plays Dani, still reeling from a family tragedy, who interjects herself into the summer vacation plans of her boyfriend Christian (Jack…
Read more
Leave it to director Mary Harron to make a feminist film about Charles Manson and his scruffy desert group of followers and the grisly murders they committed that was the death knell for the 1960s hippie-movement. Harron unfolds the story…
Read more
A raw, powerful film by Camille Vidal-Naquet about a male street sex worker in Paris is now playing at the Film Forum from April 10- 23. Felix Maritaud (who was in BPM (Beats Per Minute) gives a fearless performance as…
Read more
When I was young, I went to the movies all the time. Not just once a week. All the time. And I was a rather indiscriminate moviegoer. I’d see anything. From The Night Of the Iguana to Night Of the…
Read more