If, as the film’s logline suggests, we are to read the humble oyster as a “queer icon of New York City’s unlikely survival story,” then…
Clowning on Juggalos (see what I did there?) can sometimes feel like punching down. Their intense fandom, centered around the Detroit-based horror-rap group Insane Clown…
Queen Elizabeth II’s love of horses is well known. She even made the trek to Kentucky five separate times during her reign to visit various…
David Gutnik captures the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine from eye-level in his documentary Rule of Two Walls. Shot in the early months of 2022,…
In 2017, the avant-groove trio of John Medeski (keyboards), Billy Martin (percussions), and Chris Wood (bass) arrive at an old mountain-top mansion in the Catskills…
Within the sphere of documentary filmmaking, the line between genuine storytelling and poverty porn can often be thin. Directors can easily, even if unintentionally, exploit…
While visiting Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with her fiancé, a woman finds herself enchanted — not just with the beautiful views of the Tetons, but with…
Nearly the entire 90-minute runtime of Tim MacKenzie-Smith’s Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande is filled with the titular band’s music. This never feels…
Perhaps the first film where an alien ice mummy fails a breathalyzer test, Jesse Thomas Cook’s The Hyperborean aims for nothing less than the sort…
It’s an awkward phase, that post-graduation purgatory where possibilities seem endless, endlessly limited, or both — or so I’m told, I never went to college…
We’re in an odd place when it comes to “Covid cinema.” The time between the World Health Organization first declaring Covid-19 a pandemic in March…
Late in Queendom, the queer Russian performance artist Gena Marvin (alternately styled as Jenna Marvin) struts during a go-see where a fashion designer calls her…
Baseball and film aren’t so different. Both are a national pastime, and both traditionally enforce a sort of spiritual mindfulness that is otherwise associated with…
Patrick Dickinson’s Cottontail is an unusual type of ghost story. Its apparitions, such as they are, appear mostly in flashbacks, half-remembered tales, and, most prominently,…
In her 1977 essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that the abundance of photographic images in our culture had begun to engender “a chronic…
Fewer subgenres in recent memory have had a more fleeting window of viability, if ever it even really existed, than the “pandemic film.” Beyond that,…
With streaming services yanking titles from availability and even disappearing completed works that may now never be shown again, it might seem like the perfect…
Death hangs over Jeff Rutherford’s keenly observed and poignant feature debut, A Perfect Day for Caribou. We meet Herman (Jeb Barrier), a scruffy, world-weary man…
Following nearly three years of an ongoing pandemic, everyone has a new understanding of isolation. After varying degrees of social distancing regulations and masking recommendations,…
In Ghosts of My Life, the late writer Mark Fisher writes, about hauntology: “Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to have it resold to…