Gahan Wilson’s The Kid

Usually what happens is this: a cartoonist develops a unique style of writing and drawing, and they create their own universe that has its own sensibility- one with characters that could only exist in this place and come out of this person's mind; a logic that's all their own. The art style is instantly recognizable, …

Push

If you live in a city- and more and more often, even if you don't- you're probably constantly befuddled by how expensive it is to live somewhere. Whether as a renter or as a prospective home buyer, with each passing year you feel 200 miles further away from ever affording a home. All the data, …

Lights in the Dusk

Aki Kaurismäki is most definitely an "either you love him or you don't" type of filmmaker; like Wes Anderson, his films have a very particular vibe that only he can pull off, and after a lifetime of his work, you get the idea that he couldn't make any other kind of movie, even if he …

Ladybug Ladybug

There's something great about that string of black-and-white movies from the early 60's that I'll never grow tired of. Shot in stark, sharp black-and-white, with intense, dramatic framing and balls-to-the-wall dialogue and situations, these movies have teeth in a way no other era of film quite manages. Movies like The Pawnbroker and Fate is the …

Dáblova Past (The Devil’s Trap)

A classic Bud Dry commercial from the 80's rhetorically asks "Why are foreign movies so... foreign?" while it throws as many tropes as possible on screen: poorly dubbed Italian, grainy black and white film, odd angles, melodramatic acting, and, of course... clowns. And while that particular reference is clearly Fellini, its point- and the point …

Beautiful Noise

Some documentaries create a story, much like a work of fiction, building a narrative that draws you in emotionally, even if it takes some jiggling of facts to make that story work. Most modern docs are like this, blurring the line between fact and fiction, and making it clear that the ultimate goal isn't to …

12

What drives a person to make a film? A painting, a photo, even a book- these pieces take time and effort, but they're a singular task of one person, one canvas, one camera, one pen. But making a movie- even a bad one- is a gargantuan task that takes everything you've got: all your money, …

Julien Donkey Boy

John Waters and Harmony Korine are two sides of the same coin, having devoted their lives to chronicling the White Trash world of America's most ignored and least embraced. Waters, of course, chose to do so with a lovingly comic approach that throws kitch and social commentary into a blender and then pukes it up …

Red Rock West

A drifter so honest he won't lie on a job application or ever steal from the till finds himself mistaken for a hired assassin, saying yes to some much-needed cash before he even has a chance to think it through. With that zippy intro, John Dahl gives us the 90's neo-noir masterpiece, Red Rock West. …

The Funeral

Here's a 90's "indie film" starring Christopher Walken, Benicio del Toro, Isabella Rossellini, Annabella Sciorra, Vincent Gallo, Chris Penn, and Paul Hipp that never really made a big commercial splash, and is, for whatever reason, lost in limbo: Abel Ferrara's The Funeral, a fairly bleak crime family story about revenge and, well, revenge. All the …