The sense of dread that comes bubbling from the soil of Martha Marcy May Marlene is an oily one indeed. Sticky and messy, it is also rich with promise. Within minutes, the pastoral opening of men slin...

David Gordon Green’s The Sitter is essentially an R-rated retooling of Chris Columbus’s Adventures in Babysitting from 1987. The kids are edgier, situations are shamefully more homophobic, and, openin...

Writer/Director Wes Anderson is sort of a modern-day filmmaking hero of mine. From the opening few minutes of Bottle Rocket , I felt I had a socially awkward brother out there; another who grew up on...

There are several things Steve McQueen’s Shame isn’t trying to be. Sexy is one of them. The titillating aspects of its explicit sexual content – as this is a movie about sex addiction – are icily down...

Bringing a welcome change to the hill-meets-billy horror formula, writer/director Eli Craig’s Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil is a hilarious spoof of backwoods terror. After waiting some 40-plus years, we ha...

Tackling the territory of camp and schlock films from the 1950s with even more camp and schlock requires a bit of skill as those films, while insanely entertaining, were usually never meant to be the...

D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation , a groundbreaking film that is quickly approaching its 100 th anniversary, is still – to this day - a controversial film igniting the fear and loathing that inv...

This month Kino fires up its release of Silent Era films by unloading two classics from the towering film pioneer D.W. Griffith onto blu-ray. Way Down East is probably the lesser known of the two rele...

With a new creative zest and the same loveable spirit that guided Jim Henson and company through five seasons of The Muppet Show and a venture into feature films, director James Bobin (HBO’s Flight of...

Celebrating its 25 th anniversary as the sequel that serves as more of a remake, Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn reunites writer-director Sam Raimi and actor Bruce Campbell with the Necronomicon and then pr...

The musical genre of film cannot get any better than with George Cukor’s excellent screen adaptation of My Fair Lady . Stephen Sondheim declares it victorious in the musical comedy department and, to...

The gut-busting and side-splitting laughs found in Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker , his 1990 parody of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, are only one part of the film’s many exploitative charms. There’s...

Oy vey. The money-grubbing cynical studio executives have really scraped the bottom of the barrel for this family-friendly flashy mess of recycled pop songs. It is safe to say that Happy Feet 2 comple...

Blue Velvet , now celebrating its 25 th anniversary, remains an intoxicating look at supposed small-town tranquility in which innocence fears to tread. Written and directed by David Lynch ( Mulholland...

Famed director Clint Eastwood continues to pound out film after noteworthy film in a career that seems to stretch back into the very beginning of the motion picture industry itself and, while his work...