Original Cinemaniac

Movie Reviews by Dennis Dermody

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…
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Beethoven’s Nephew

            I think it was my sadness reading about the death of the sublime Jane Birkin that encouraged me to revisit a 1985 film she was in that was directed by Paul Morrissey– Beethoven’s Nephew. I remember loving the movie when…
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Fear the Night

            Maggie Q plays a toughened, yet damaged, Iraqi war veteran named Tes who begrudgingly accompanies her sisters to their parents’ farmhouse way out in the desert for a bachelorette party. Her sister Beth (Kat Foster), a Stepford Wife with an…
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Beau is Afraid

            One of the best films people didn’t see in theaters recently was Beau is Afraid. It’s coming on on Blu-ray on July 11 from Lionsgate and I urge you to experience it’s maniacal charms. Directed by Ari Aster’s it’s about…
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Mexico Macabre

            Spooky castles, vengeful witches, malevolent eyeless crying women and a shapeshifting Baron who transforms into a hairy, big-headed monster with an elongated forked tongue that sucks out your brain. These are some of the pleasures in an astonishing new Blu-ray…
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The Mother and the Whore

            Film at Lincoln Center and Janus Films announced an incredible retrospective from July 7-13: “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache” celebrating the career of the iconoclastic French post-New Wave director. “The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can…
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