Sketch comedy films, the spiritual descendants of 1930s cinematic musical extravaganzas and 1960s television variety shows, hit their peak popularity in the 1970s. Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different, Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, and the inaugural Zucker-Abrams-Zucker outing Kentucky Fried Movie captured the free-wheeling irreverence of the…
24 Days (24 jours) ★★★★✫ Director: Alexandre Arcady Menemsha Films (Official Site) 110 Minutes Release Date: April 24, 2015 (limited) – It’s Paris, 2006, and handsome young Ilan Halimi (Syrus Shahidi) has been kidnapped, his family tortured by angry phone calls demanding €450,000 for his release. If the Halimis were a rich family, this might…
Everyone loves a good bad movie, but not every bad movie works as a late-night laugh-a-thon. As the crew of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” explained in Wired‘s oral history of the show, they couldn’t just pick any old bad movie to riff. The films couldn’t be “boring and really, really talky,” and they had to…
That Guy Dick Miller ★★★★✫ Director: Elijah Drenner Indiecan Entertainment (Official Site) 91 Minutes Release Date: April 3, 2015 (limited) / Available on VOD and DVD May 19, 2015 – That Guy Dick Miller is an affectionate documentary that takes us through the life and career of, well, Dick Miller, the character actor who, for…
If early Hollywood films are any indication, a good 47% of women by volume found themselves abandoned, unmarried and pregnant at some point in their lives. They rarely suffered much by way of social ostracism — there was almost always a progressive aunt or someone willing to pass the child off as their own —…
The Barber ★★★✫✫ Director: Basil Owies ARC Entertainment (Official Site) 95 Minutes Release Date: March 27, 2015 (limited) – It was almost twenty years ago when serial killer Francis Allen Visser, a middle-aged man with a penchant for burying his young, female victims alive, was released from prison, thanks to the many mistakes the cop…
A Wolf at the Door ★★★★½ / ★★★★★ Director: Fernando Coimbra Outsider Pictures (Official Site) 100 Minutes Release Date March 27, 2015 (limited) – It’s a warm and sunny day in Rio de Janeiro when six-year-old Clara (Isabelle Ribas) goes missing from her school. Her panicked mother Sylvia (Fabiula Nascimento) reports it to the police.…
Before they became the kind of actors one gets when one wants to add a little class to an otherwise iffy production, Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine headlined the Sherlock Holmes spoof Without a Clue (1988), a gentle period comedy that cheekily posits that the fictional Holmes both did and did not exist. Without a…
Alfredo Valente portrait of Tallulah Bankhead, 1930s (via)
The Wrecking Crew ★★★½ / ★★★★★ Director: Denny Tedesco Magnolia Pictures (Official Site) 101 Minutes Release Date March 13, 2015 (limited); DVD release June 15, 2015 – It was the 1960s and American pop music, long dominated by the so-called “Brill Building Sound,” had moved across the country. California was where it was at, and…