Ghost World
Ghost World (2001) is a classic. It’s a film that I and all my friends in high school loved. We related to the cynicism of Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson… Read more »
Party Girl
Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s film Party Girl (1995) is a euphoric love letter to the underground club culture and queer scene in New York circa the early nineties. The film… Read more »
Bayou
When I was a kid my father worked at the video store Movies Unlimited. My dad used to cut a bunch of scenes together from different movies, sometimes looping them,… Read more »
Snack Shack
Adam Carter Rehmeier’s film Snack Shack (2024) follows in the footsteps of Summer Days, Summer Nights (2018), Adventureland (2009) and a slew of other summer set coming-of-age dramas. Although it… Read more »
Glory Daze
I didn’t much care for Glory Daze (1995). However, it’s worth watching just for the scene where Mary Woronov performs the heimlich maneuver on a very young Sam Rockwell. It’s… Read more »
Stay Hungry
Stay Hungry (1976) is director Bob Rafelson at his weirdest. At one point he juxtaposes the Mr. Universe contest with a sexual assault as if the masculinist bravura of bodybuilding… Read more »
Touch
Paul Schrader’s adaptation of a novel by Elmore Leonard, Touch (1997), is something of an unsung entry in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Touch is both darkly comic and politically relevant, even… Read more »
Fat City
Speaking to Lillian Ross, John Huston once described the film industry as “A closed-in, tight, frantically inbred and frantically competitive jungle”. It’s an apt description that could easily be applied… Read more »
Last Embrace
With his film Last Embrace (1979) Jonathan Demme tackles the aesthetic idiom of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma with his own variation on Vertigo (1958). Demme’s film concerns a… Read more »
You Can Call Me Bill
Alexandre O. Phillippe’s You Can Call Me Bill (2024) finds its subject, William Shatner, thinking about the end of his life, global warming, and a career spent entertaining the world… Read more »
