In 1978, Gene Mulvihill, a Wall Street penny stock scammer, created New Jersey’s infamous Action Park. Featuring insanely dangerous water slides, go-carts, boats and more, which skirted regulations and safety laws, the park added many injuries and some deaths to its roster before closing in 1996. Seth Porges and Chris Charles Scott’s documentary, Class Action... Continue Reading →
Like Boys Shorts, Outfest’s Girls Shorts program always sells out. I’ve often felt guilty slipping into the theater on a Press Pass, taking a seat from a young lesbian in the standby line who really wanted to see herself up on that screen. With the festival streaming online this year, goodbye guilt and hello girls!... Continue Reading →
Over the years, too many LGBTQ+ films have relied on tired tropes to tell our stories. Coming out angst, U-haul lesbians, and drugged out circuit queens have seemingly been done to death. Imagine my surprise while watching writer/director Caleb Johnson’s The Carnivores, which on the surface trots out the old chestnut of Lesbian Bed Death,... Continue Reading →
Full disclosure: I’ve known Kergan Edwards-Stout for the better part of thirty years. I was there for many of the events depicted in his book and am even mentioned in it. Despite this, I am going to be as objective as I can with this review. Truth be told, I would have read this book... Continue Reading →
A few months ago, I reviewed Come And See, a masterful 1985 film which followed a young Soviet boy through the horrors of life during World War II. Clearly influenced by Jerzy Kosinki’s indelible yet discredited 1965 autobiography, the plot centered around a young Eastern European Jewish boy wandering from town to town towards the... Continue Reading →
Owing as much to the Italian giallo films of the 60s and 70s such as Suspiria as it does to Stanley Kubrick at his most arch with A Clockwork Orange, Peter Strickland’s In Fabric blazes out of the gates as one of the loopiest, most gorgeously shot thrillers I’ve seen in ages. Although set in... Continue Reading →
By now, we all know Judd Apatow makes long movies. With the right script, premise and actors, however, you may find yourself having a great time basking in his universe. He takes his time, allows for breathing room, and essentially makes mumblecore movies on a large scale. Call it Jumbocore. With his latest, The King... Continue Reading →
With their feature film debut, director Andrew Patterson and his co-writer Craig W. Sanger have made an idiosyncratic splash with the micro budget yet winning sci-fi mystery, The Vast Of Night. Set in 1950s small town New Mexico, the film begins with a Twilight Zone style introduction as we push in on an old fashioned... Continue Reading →
Chip Gutchell feels dead inside. An office IT drone who goes through the motions with his wife, he seems sapped of joy until one day at a scheduled prostate exam, he discovers he likes things stuck up his butt. He starts out innocently enough, inserting small objects, but when larger, breathing things go missing in... Continue Reading →
A classic satire comes along every so often to remind me, more than other film genres, that great art can come with a sucker punch to the frontal lobes. Movies such as Network, Nightcrawler, Heathers, and The Lobster remind us that when humans go bad, it’s tragic yet devastatingly entertaining. In 1999, Alexander Payne brought... Continue Reading →
