In Pedro Almodovar’s exquisite new film, Antonio Banderas plays Salvador Mallo, an acclaimed filmmaker, who, after a series of debilitating health problems, has stopped working. For Salvador, “without filming, my life is meaningless.” A remastering of one of his…
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Director Alexandre O. Philippe uses the same kind of inspired deconstruction he did with the Psycho shower sequence in 78/52– this time the iconic chest-busting scene in Alien. Philippe charts the film’s inception from Dan O’Bannon’s early script, which…
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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-…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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