The Film:

Imagine you were told by your friend to come to his house for dinner. Your friend happens to be a director and you happen to be an actor, so you know it's some sort of gig, but you're not exactly sure what. You arrive at your friend's house, meet 7 strangers who were also told to arrive at the same time, and are asked to be a part of a no-budget movie. You don't get a script, just a character background. You don't get lines, those you gotta make up on the spot. And over the course of the next five days, you and these other people pair up as fictional couples, sit down to dinners, and attempt to act, not really knowing why. Each day...Read the entire review

The holidays signal many things: families reuniting, plenty of heavy meals, and of course, an-ever increasing emphasis on shopping. Underneath all of it (or, depending on your tolerance level, obnoxiously underlining it) is Christmas music, which is now mandated to begin playing at malls and grocery stores across America at 12:01 on November 1st. However, for some people, Christmas music isn't seasonal, but a year-round obsession, and one of them, Mitchell Kezin, decided to give his obscure hobby a spotlight with a documentary. Jingle Bell Rocks! follows Kezin as he goes around the country, speaking to musicians and other collectors about Christmas music, both to try and dig a little deeper into the music or help them spotlight their favorite oddball cuts, as well as attempt to dig into his own love of this particular, fascinating subgenre of music.

In terms of personal discovery, Kezin is w...Read the entire review

The Movie:

It's a time of crisis for pop culture collectors. With movies and music slowly all getting sucked up into "the cloud," enthusiasts who like to have physical objects -- discs, tapes, reels, etc. -- attached to their viewing and listening experiences, whether for sentimental or practical reasons (I don't have to hear all my albums on vinyl, but it's hard to deny that Blu-rays look so much better than streaming video), we are finding ourselves treated like relics -- just like the precious media we covet and horde. The line between enthusiast and obsessive inevitably blurs. Maybe that's why the subjects of Russ Forster's 1995 documentary about 8-track tape collectors, Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The Canadian crime film Whitewash is essentially a confined-area drama set in a wide open space. Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) stars as Bruce, an alcoholic snowplow driver who, at the start of the movie, runs over a man with his plow. It's first thing in the morning, the rest of the town is asleep, and so no one sees him take the body of Paul (Marc Labréche) and bury it in a snow bank. Rather than continue to cover his tracks, in his haste to get away, Bruce ends up getting his plow stuck in the snow deep in the woods. There he remains trapped, unable to take the plow back, afraid to otherwise answer for where he's been and why the missing man's car is...Read the entire review

The summary for Whitewash on the back of its DVD case says that it's "a darkly comic noir in the vein of the Coen Brothers." A pretty specific claim, and a ballsy one at that. I guess it doesn't take much to be dark, just kill off a few characters and feature depressing aspects. Darkly comic though, that's something else entirely. It takes talent to create a balance between funny & horrible, to manufacture a situation that forces audiences to laugh or go crazy. And lastly, to emulate the Coen Brothers? That's something almost no one can do, a difficult task for even the most talented directors, let alone one who's attempting his...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The most interesting aspect of the new documentary Teenage, based on the book by Jon Savage, is its main assertion that teenagers as a class didn't exist until the twentieth century. Once child labor laws took underage workers out of industrial jobs, suddenly millions of young men and women had their adolescence given back to them. Of course, as the events of the film are essentially bookended by World Wars I and II (with a brief flashback at the start and a briefer flash-forward at the end), these youngsters' adolescence is not entirely their own. Though teenagers have become a major cultural force over the past century or so, they must operate in the adults' world. If the film reflects a timeless tension, then it would be this one.

THE MOVIE:

The 2013 film Teenage is basically a documentary as collage. Directed by Matt Wolf, who also assembled the narrative with writer Jon Savage (Joy Division), Teenage cobbles together archival footage, photographs, and artful re-creations to create a timeline following the emerging teenage class and youth movements throughout the 20th Century. Set to period music and actors reading from actual diaries written by adolescents in England, America, and Germany, it shows how youths went from jumping straight into the work force at the turn of the century to establishing what we now see as the young adult years while also influencing politics and culture.

Some matters...Read the entire review

The Movie:

12 O'Clock Boys opens with the footage of a group of young black men waiting in the back of a van. Over this image, we hear the voice of a person (If I had to bet, I'd say Caucasian), either a right wing radio host or a caller to such a program. He rages on about these kids, "These black kids, I know no one wants to bring up their race" (How brave of you to say that behind a phone). He claims that these kids are dangerous and a scourge on society. He finishes by saying "I don't care if they're harmed. In fact, I don't care if they're all killed."

So what are these kids getting ready to do, waiting inside that van? Are they going to indiscriminately murder innocent women and children? Are they on their way to pillage and rape the entire neighborhood? Or are they waiting to ride their dirt bikes in the area to let off some steam? If you answered option three, congratulati...Read the entire review

The Film:

Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey) are visiting France for their honeymoon, but Shane is acting strangely. June, of course, expects not only to spent the vacation with Shane, but she also expects a little intimacy, but Shane is distant, especially in the physical sense. Secretly, Shane is searching for one of his old colleagues, Leo (Alex Descas), whose research may be able to help him with a sickness that afflicts him. We see the same sickness in one of Leo's current patients, Core (Beatrice Dalle), who is introduced to the viewer covered in blood, having viciously gnawed on some poor truck driver in a field in the middle of a fit of sexual passion.

Trouble Every Day is often referred to as director / co-writer Claire Denis' take on a monster movie. Some say vampire, but werewolf seems almost more appropriate: instead of the full moon, it's sexual arousal that triggers the trans...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The new documentary After Tiller is a portrait of the four doctors in the United States who currently openly perform late-term abortions (abortions performed after twenty-five weeks of pregnancy). The film is not explicitly polemical, nor does it take a clinical approach like Tony Kaye's famous abortion documentary Lake of Fire. The directors, Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, seem most interested in exploring what leads a person to decide to have an abortion so late in the pregnancy and what kind of doctors would persist in working in a specialty that comes with constant death threats and is slowly being criminalized by various state and local government...Read the entire review

Within the already provocative and widely-debated topic of abortion law, there is the smaller but even more controversial occurrence of late-term abortions. Although many people adopt different parameters for what constitutes a "late-term abortion", Dr. George Tiller specialized in abortions performed during the third trimester (about 25 weeks). The procedure is only legal in 9 states, is generally only done when the physical or psychological health of either the mother or child is at risk, and makes up less than 1% of abortions performed in the United States. In 2009, because of his practice, George Tiller, was assassinated while attending church. Afterward, four friends and colleagues -- the only four in the entire country -- continue his work in the face of overwhelming pressure from religious and political forces.

It seems likely that those who are anti-abortion will not watch After TillerRead the entire review