A young woman goes on a couple of dates with a young man only to find out that he has given her something that there were no high school film strips to warn her about. It Follows is the story of Jay (Maika Monroe) who is smitten with Hugh, but unfortunately he hasn’t told her that […]
The documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry takes a thorough look at the American feminist movement from the mid-’60s through the early ’70s. The film concentrates on 1966 through 1971 and features in-depth interviews with numerous contributors and leaders of the movement in an effort to explore how the movement was started and what the struggle […]
I heard about David James Gere shortly after I interviewed his partner in crime, Tommy DeNucci. These two frequently work together, and let’s just say they create waves in the movie world. And, um, he’s not too shabby in the art, wrestling and night life world. I met Gere on the set of Blue Line, […]
The Wrecking Crew documents the history of a group of Los Angeles-based studio musicians who were known in the recording industry by the titular nickname. This group was at the heart of the recording industry, playing the actual music on records by musical acts such as The Monkees, Sonny And Cher, Nancy Sinatra, Herb Alpert and […]
“She looks alarmed, and it is the same disingenuousness that marked the bad acting of so many of Emily’s friends … when they pretended to be actors in their community theater dramas …” – Chris Bohjalian, The Night Strangers “It’s very hard to insert nudity into an Ibsen play.” – Patrick (Kevin Broccoli), “Amateurs” “No […]
To follow up my previous piece about the great films showing at Il Cinema Ritrovato next week, I am reviewing another film that will be shown during the festival: Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion, a fascinating, but somewhat forgotten thriller that won the best foreign film Oscar in 1971. Investigation… concerns a police detective who kills his girlfriend […]
One of the great things about writing for Motif is cluing people in to theatrical events that otherwise might go unnoticed by the general film-going public. Next week the Italian Studies Department at Brown University will present a touring version of Il Cinema Ritrovato, a yearly festival held to showcase the restoration work performed by the […]
Dave Borges recently debuted his new film, One Foot in the Grave, at Cable Car Cinema in Providence. It was shown to a sizable audience of mostly cast and crew, and it was paired with Bryan Casey’s shorter thriller He Never Said a Word, a film that Borges helped to edit. Both films were commendable. He Never […]
For my first official review at Motif, I couldn’t have lucked out more since What We Do In The Shadows is such a treat of a film. Brought to us by the creators of “Flight Of The Concords,” this horror comedy from New Zealand defies the limited expectations that come with the description “comedy horror […]
Criticism is not about the conscious refusal to distance oneself from the audience, but about trying to explain why or why not a prospective audience member would want to invest in experiencing a particular work. Every film has some plausible audience, but some films are cynically made for an audience of idiots and it is […]