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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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…
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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…
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Do you remember all those “No Spitting” signs in the subway that threatened fines and arrest and imprisonment? I was fascinated by them as a kid. I’d ask my parents repeatedly why spitting was such a criminal act, but they…
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This year’s five-day festival at the IFC Center (March 20-24th) is so damn good it makes me angry. There are just too many great sounding films this year. I read the schedule and needed to see almost every one of…
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“The Ultimate Bad Trip” is how the ad should read for Gaspar Noe’s harrowing, hallucinatory nightmare of a rave that goes disastrously wrong. The film begins showing a TV monitor and interviews with an array of dancers who describe the…
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To be honest, it sucked in theaters this year. Sure there were some terrific movies, but they were dwarfed by Marvel super heroes or Jurassic sequels or more Impossible Missions. Not that I don’t need a fix of that once…
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We are all people on the go. Every morning on the subway I see people juggling coffee, newspapers, scrolling their iPhones- all the while careful not to make eye contact with the homeless man wandering down the aisle asking for…
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Even Tolstoy, the great Russian author, understood the power of cinema. He was jealous of its limitless possibilities, compared with the written word, for combining editing, sound and image, and thought that film would be the artistic medium of the…
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