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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Now if you have a child, or take care of one, or just plain kidnapped one, eventually you have to take them to a movie. Movies geared for children fall into many categories. Disney represents safe family fare for most…
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What idiot thought it would be a lucrative idea to make a movie about a greedy Genoese explorer who accidentally discovered the Bahamas? And not just one movie, but two multimillion dollar catastrophes. Did they really think it would be…
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One the best film festivals, now celebrating its 56th year (from Sept. 28-October 14) arrives with an incredible selection of world films. Any festival that has new films by the Coen Brothers, Claire Denis, Barry Jenkins, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Luc…
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