The Movie:

Peter Coyote and Nick Mancuso play the titular Heartbreakers in Bobby Roth's 1984 Los Angeles-set drama. These characters aren't young men, but they aren't exactly old either. They are certainly old enough to know better.

Coyote is Arthur Blue, a mercurial painter whose recent work has focused on pseudo-pin-ups inspired by Bettie Page. His relationship to Cyd (Modern Romance's Kathryn Harrold) implodes after five years because, despite his sensitivity, Blue wasn't able to make room for their relationship beside his work.

Mancuso is Blue's longtime pal Eli, a businessman in his father's schmatta empire. Eli claims to want a relationship but -- shocker!...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Highball is a fascinating little relic from the late '90s. It was co-conceived and directed by Noah Baumbach, who removed his name from the finished product along with co-writers Carlos Jacott and Christopher Reed (the current home video version has their credits restored). Much like Paul Auster and Wayne Wang's Blue in the Face, which was a largely improvised lark that drafted off the production momentum of the much more polished film Smoke, Highball was shot in a week shortly after the production of Baumbach's Mr. Jealousy. Most of the cast is carried over, although the recognizable actors take a ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Satan's Children is a strange low-budget exploitation hodgepodge made in Tampa, Florida, in the mid-'70s. Previously released on Blu-ray as the second feature behind Satanis: The Devil's Mass, Satan's Children has now earned it own spotlight release with new bonuses.

It's easy to see why the film is being positioned for rediscovery. Satan's Children has the right mix of unintentional camp lunacy and runtime-padding boredom to hit the sweet spot for vintage bad movie fanatics. One is tempted to peg this regional oddity as a mix of Multiple Maniacs and Manos: The Hands of Fate.

A...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Miami Blues is a dark comic crime movie from 1990 that has consistently flown under the radar, even by the standards of a "cult classic." It stars a young Alec Baldwin on the verge of stardom (his turn as Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October hit theaters just before this). It's a Jonathan Demme production that was written and directed by fellow graduate of the Roger Corman "school," George Armitage (Vigilante Force, Grosse Pointe Blank), from the book by Cockfighter novelist Charles Willeford.

The end product bears distinct fingerprint...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Marianne Elliott-Said, better known as her public persona Poly Styrene, was the leader of the English punk band X-Ray Spex. The group's brief but brilliant career included the release of the anthemic anti-authoritarian single "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" and the beloved album Germfree Adolescents. As a young woman of color with braces on her teeth and her own iconoclastic sense of fashion, she became an instant outsider icon.

The new biographical documentary, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, is almost as unexpected as its subject. Directed by Paul Sng (Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain) and Poly Styrene's daughter Celeste Bell, I Am a Cliché is not your standard-issue punk rock doc.

Framed through Bell's complicate...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director David Lean has been quoted as saying that the 1955 romance Summertime is his favorite film that he made. While watching the film for this review, I had one roommate walk through the room and comment that David Lean is the most boring filmmaker he has encountered. Meanwhile, another roommate -- a fan of Lean's -- sat with me and got gradually antsier as the film went on, announcing at the end that Summertime might be the worst film from a major filmmaker he had ever seen.

I mention this up top just because context in filmgoing is important. My personal enjoyment of Summertime was hit-and-miss -- I certainly am nowhere near as enthusiastic as Lean about this film -- but maybe this particular viewing influenced my r...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Ang Lee's career has taken a number of odd twists and turns over the years, as he's shifted from indie darling to world-class filmmaker to idiosyncratic technical craftsman. Most viewers looking at Lee's most recently released film, Gemini Man, and his first completed feature, Pushing Hands, would have trouble identifying them as the work of the same director.

Pushing Hands, newly remastered and reissued on Blu-ray, was made several years after Lee had graduated from NYU film school, but one could be forgiven for assuming that this 1991 release was a feature-length thesis project. Pushing Hands is well-made for a low-budget indie, but it is overly studied a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Originally released in 1987, Rouge is the third film from Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan (Center Stage). It's a love story that is swooningly romantic at first blush but Rouge leaves a decidedly unsentimental aftertaste.

Anita Mui stars as Fleur, a 1930's courtesan with a quiet grace and elegance that catches the eye of middle-class playboy Chan Chen-Peng (Leslie Cheung). Their romance is sensually wrought in teasing close-ups and fluid tracking shots. Chen-Peng (often referred to as "Twelfth Master" due to his family rank) is bold with Fleur but her experience gives her the subtle upper hand. This dynamic is perfectly captured in a moment where Twelfth Master br...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Coca-Cola Kid (1985) is one of those fascinating mismatches of material and filmmaker that still kind of works despite itself.

Dušan Makavejev is one of the most popular avant-garde directors of the '60s and '70s, whose best-known film is WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). WR prankishly combines documentary, narrative, and agitprop in what could be termed Makavejev's signature style. By the mid-'80s, however, it seems like Makavejev just wanted to work. His 1974 film Sweet Movie was a litmus test for hipness in the button-pushing vein...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Walker (1987) is the last film to date that director Alex Cox has made with a major Hollywood studio, and one suspects that neither party is all that torn up about it. Cox, who made his name with Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, is the kind of unrepentant rebel whose point-of-view makes for wild and challenging films but not often a lot of money. (Of his lesser-known independent productions, I recommend the Beckettian travelogue Three Businessmen.)

One wonders what exactly Universal Pictures thought it was getting when it greenlit Walker, ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Renata Pinheiro's 2021 Brazilian oddity King Car is an automobile movie with some of the psychosexual energy of Julia Ducournau's Titane, some of the sentient-car sadism of John Carpenter's Christine, and a heaping helping of Cinema Novo-style surrealism.

Lucian Pedro Jr. appears as Uno, a young man who was literally born into the taxi business: his mother gave birth to him in the back of a cab. From a young age, Uno has a special gift that allows him to telepathically talk to one of his dad's c...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The cozy '70s detective show Columbo made a comeback of sorts during the 2020 pandemic lockdown when folks needed comfort-food TV to binge. Buoyed by the gruff charisma of Peter Falk, Columbo succeeds despite consistently robbing its whodunit plot of surprise: we are shown the murder up top and then made to guess when Falk's trenchcoat-wearing detective will catch up to what we already know.

The 2020 spoof Inspector Ike should delight Columbo fans (newly converted and long-standing alike) by giving '70s TV mysteries the...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Bertrand Tavernier's 1986 film 'Round Midnight is one of the best movies set in the world of jazz music. Legendary tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon plays a fictional amalgam of Lester Young and Bud Powell, in a loosely told story inspired by the journals of illustrator Francis Paudras. Paudras was a Parisian jazz fanatic who helped keep pianist Bud Powell afloat in the late '50s, financially and spiritually.

Dexter Gordon so fully embodies his character, called Dale Turner in the film, that numerous reviews over the years assume that Gordon's Oscar-nominated performance here is just the jazzman playing himself in a 1950s context. As the interviews on the Blu-ray make abundantly clear, Gordon does a seamless job of embodying the physicality ...Read the entire review

The Collection:
The new Blu-ray company Canadian International Pictures (CIP) has the mission to shine a light on the neglected homegrown cinema of the Great White North. Their debut disc was the '60s production The Ernie Game, and the follow-up release is dubbed The Other French New Wave, Vol. 1, collecting three '60s flicks from acclaimed Montréal-based filmmakers. As the set's title suggests, there is a kinship with the work of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, et. al., but the directors represented here also have a strong foundation in documentary filmmaking. Their fiction films include a hint of fly-on-the-wall actualities.

The set kicks off with Gilles Groulx's The Cat in the BagRead the entire review

The Movie:

The comic fantasy Miracle in Milan (Miracolo a Milano) debuted in 1951, between director Vittorio De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini's best-known films, Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D.. Miracle's subject matter and characters fit in with those acclaimed examples of Italian neorealism, but its tone is several dozen shades lighter.

Miracle in Milan is not the kind of film you'd expect when you hear it is set in a shantytown and peopled with many non-professional poor actors. It's part fairy tale-style fantasy and part Preston St...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay's 2002 follow-up to her poetic debut Ratcatcher, cemented her reputation as a filmmaker to watch. Years of tangling with the Hollywood machine have led to a number of unrealized projects or films that wound up coming to the screen in the care of other directors. Lynne Ramsay's name has only appeared on two other (brilliant and idiosyncratic) feature films in the past two decades. In 2022, she's still a filmmaker to watch, even if the roar of buzz that initally accompanied the release of Morvern Callar has transformed into the murmurs of an excited cult.

Fun City Editions' new Blu-ray of Morvern Callar will hopefully go a long wa...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The 1997 romance Love Jones occupies a unique cultural space, especially for African-American viewers. Far from a box office success upon release, it nonetheless has lived on as a perennial classic, with an accompanying soundtrack album that is as beloved as the film. At the time it hit theaters, Love Jones stood out as a '90s Black film that wasn't about crime or violence, and didn't prominently feature somebody tragically dying. (Hell, even the '90s stoner classic Friday has a bizarre amount of dramatic violence for a mostly breezy comedy.) A portrait of middle-class bohemia on the south side of Chicago, Love Jones has a shaggy hang-out vibe that is enticing eno...Read the entire review

The Movie:

David Huggins says that he has had over one hundred alien encounters in his life. He lost his virginity to a beautiful female alien, fathered dozens of alien-human children, and continues to be visited by aliens in his seventies. The 2017 documentary Love and Saucers lets Huggins tell his story in his own words, offering ammunition for skeptics without undermining what Huggins says.

Huggins has created over one hundred paintings about his various encounters with the aliens and, along with his verbal recollections, these images help form the backbone of Love and Saucers. There's something raw about the work, which is often highly sexualized and sometimes resembles the covers of classic sci-fi paperbacks. That rawness speaks to the ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Way back in the 90's, Ralph Zavadil was a no-budget daredevil, cranking out goofy homemade TV shows for his local community cable station in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, under the name Cap'n Video. Clips of Zavadil's show suggest a silly and gross precursor to Jackass -- but without the high production values. The 2011 documentary Beauty Day, from director Jay Cheel (Shudder's Cursed Films), covers Cap'n Video's rise to cult stardom and his unceremonious fall.

Actually, in a way, it is an unceremonious fall that helps feed that cult stardom. The film opens with a clip of Zavadil attempting to remove a plastic pool cover with excessive flair. He climbs a ladder b...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Director Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) returns with another character-driven, '70s-styled drama taking viewers on a trip through the lifestyles of the poor and struggling. His new film Red Rocket is spiked with plenty of humor -- mostly pretty dark and ironic -- and his lead Simon Rex seems game to play up his party-boy-doofus comic persona while adding layers of disturbing psychology to his shtick.

Rex's character, Mikey, is a middle-aged porn star who returns to his tiny Texas hometown, flat broke and covered in bruises. He sweet-talks his way back into the home of his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and her mother Lil (Brenda Deiss), supposedly until he can make a new start. Mikey does actually attempt t...Read the entire review