Imagine a talk-y mash-up of Rocky Horror Picture Show and West Side Story by way of Ed Wood, and you might come close to approximating Amanda Kramer’s theatrical uber-indie Please Baby Please. Kramer also appears to draw inspiration from Kenneth Anger and his 1964 release Scorpio Rising, as well as a list of Fassbinder and John Waters flicks, in a …
If you think life is hard for women in our 2022 world, try being a 14 year old daughter of an impoverished English aristocrat in the 1290. As much as girls have always been girls, in that era, ‘coming of age’ happened while restrained and controlled in a thousand different ways. This included being married …
It’s not news that teenagers eat their own…that’s been the case since way before the internet. Now social media is aiding and abetting the most reptilian, judgmental, fear-mongering parts of all of our minds, and challenging those who’ve come up post-net in new ways we can’t even imagine. Society has yet to determine just how …
There’s no question that writer-director April Wright loves the drive-in. She showed herself an avid and curious fan when she released her 2013 documentary Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-In Movie. In it she tracked the history of the cinematic pastime, and the nostalgia she and many others feel about it, with passion …
Director/co-writer Thyrone Tommy’s debut feature Learn to Swim is premiering on Netflix on Monday, August 15th. It’s just the kind of languid, intense story of love and loss that demands to be watched during the most sweltering days of summer. It follows sax player and arranger Dezi (Thomas Antony Olajide), as he reflects on his relationship with …
When teacher Antoinette Lapouge (Laure Calamy) takes the stage with her class of 8-year-olds to sing what can only be described as a completely inappropriate love song to a parent assembly dressed in a low-cut silver lamé gown, it’s clear she’s a bit of an emotional fruit loop. Her students sing the verse, but she …
With Antonia’s Line, writer/director Marleen Gorris created a film that is both a celebration of life and an unflinching look at the challenges intergenerational women faced throughout the 20th century. The feminist filmmaker achieved for world cinema what many great female directors before her could not. 1994’s Antonia’s Line represents the first foreign-language film by a female filmmaker …
Matt Tannenbaum is all about stories. He loves telling them and living them, and for over 40 years, he has loved selling them through his beloved local institution, The Bookstore, in Lenox Massachusetts. Hello Bookstore pays homage to him and to his store. As far as recent economics are concerned, his is a common tale. …
At the end of his experimental film Lux Aeterna, writer/director and provocateur Gaspar Noé plasters the line “Thank God I’m an atheist” onto the screen. As an auteur, cinema should be Noé’s chosen deity, although whether he did it dirty or created a worthy offering to that god with his movie is a matter of opinion. …
When Isaac Mizrahi called Mrs. Kasha Davis a ‘workhorse queen’ on RuPaul’s Drag Race, those of us who know and love drag beyond RPDR knew what he meant. There is a whole country full of drag artists, from sea to sequin-sparkling, shining sea, that work without the benefit of national and international television. They hone their …
