Film
Got My Vans On But They Look Like Sneakers
By David N. MeyerIn his debut mega-low-budget two-person romantic comedy, director Barry Jenkins presents the most delicate, far-reaching, and least muddled-headed version of the enduring hipster/indie identity question: If I can’t find community among those who like what I love and dislike what I despise, where can I ever find it?
Takashi Miike takes New York
By David WilentzDirector Takashi Miike is hyperbole personified. The perversion and ultraviolence in his films is as extreme as Miike is prolific—over seventy movies and television shows since he graduated from assistant to director in 1991.
Japanese Cult Cinema and Abjection
By Evan WalterCult cinema can be hard to define but easy to recognize. Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954), for example, lives in the pantheon of all time great films.
A Night at the (Virtual) Opera
By Tessa DeCarloClose to 450 movie theaters in the United States now show live broadcasts of performances beamed from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and hundreds of thousands of people are happily paying $20 and more a ticket to attend. The obvious question is: why?
On Golden Pond, With a Psycho
By Mary HanlonJohn Stahl’s 1945 film Leave Her To Heaven is said to be nearly unclassifiable. Branded a “Technicolor Film Noir”, Heaven is dark, twisted, and the dark and light coexist quite well in this refreshing, disturbing, slightly misogynistic tale of love gone horribly wrong.
I Hate Mathematics and Racists
By Lu ChenThe Class is funny, true-to-life, and hard to classify. Loosely based on the memoir by François Bégaudeau about his experience as a literature teacher in an inner city high school in a working-class neighborhood, Class stars the author in a fictionalized version of himself.
