Telling an alternately funny and spooky story entirely through television commercials and fictional news programs, Buffet Infinity, written and directed by Simon Glassman, and performed by a cast of Canadian comic actors, had us marveling at its low-budget narrative and editorial mastery. A sly satire of overconsumption, machine-learning, and the horror genre, the film unfolds...
Adapted by writer-director Mike Flanagan from a Stephen King story, “The Life of Chuck” is one of those rare movies about which the less said the better. Absent prior knowledge of the work’s central question, the uninitiated viewer will discover a profoundly human film of stupendous emotional power. Once you catch your breath and dry...
Created with stop-motion animation — think “Wallace and Gromit” — Memoir of a Snail is simultaneously funny, heartbreaking, and uplifting. The eponymous snail is actually a lonely woman named Grace (voiced exquisitely by Sarah Snook), born with a cleft lip and touched by a series of horrible tragedies. The film follows Grace through childhood to adulthood, when...
Written, directed, edited, and starring Joanna Arnow, The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, is a painfully funny, mildly disturbing deadpan comedy about Ann, a young Jewish woman in New York floating between an unsatisfying office career and intermittently satisfying submissive sexual relationships. Its honesty (and believability) left us dazzled. Arnow, who...
To assay the role of Fanny Brice in the musical Funny Girl, singing iconic songs like “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” takes courage, confidence, and once-in-a-generation talent — because there is only one Barbra Streisand, and she will forever be the Empress Queen. Fortunately for Katerina McKrimmon, a newcomer starring in the touring...
For more than forty years one of our favorite writers, Detroit-based Peter Werbe, has been publishing provocative essays about capitalism, technology, religion, politics, and popular culture in the anarchist journal The Fifth Estate, where he’s long been an indispensable member of the editorial collective. Some of his best work is now organized in a compulsively readable...
Alien invasion! Earth occupied by creatures far smarter than humans! Thousands of years of civilization rendered irrelevant! Cory Finley’s movie adaptation of M.T. Anderson’s novel Landscape with Invisible Hand accomplishes the impressive feat of being simultaneously incisive/critical/instructive and entertaining/funny/touching. While the film is ultimately a scathing indictment of colonialism, capitalism, and artificial intelligence, the action...
The poet Jennifer Battisti was a Las Vegas latchkey kid, with casino employee parents. Off Boulder Highway, her extraordinary memoir, some of it fictionalized, much of it beautifully poetic, all of it alarmingly real, makes the performative Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas seem like a sanitized Disney fantasy. Sloppy sex, meth addiction, blackout drunkenness...
The cinematic thriller “Last Moment of Clarity,” written and directed by James and Colin Krisel in their major film debut, is a melange of Hitchcockian plot devices — “Vertigo,” particularly — assembled with assured artfulness and narrative control. We’re given what seems like a set of facts — a hapless fellow (Zach Avery, nicely understated)...
Alice Wu’s autobiographical romantic comedy “The Half of It” is worth watching for many reasons, including its original and modern take on the Cyrano de Bergerac theme of love letters written by a surrogate. Perhaps the movie’s biggest revelation is the performance of Leah Lewis, a singer-songwriter whose utter naturalness on screen suggests she’ll soon...
Domestic Terrorists“Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.” – U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, ordering the release of a…
David Breskin, a renowned record producer, author and artist, wrote a poem every day for six months in 2024, prohibiting himself from revising. Instead, he “timestamped” each work at the moment of completion — and returned to composition the next day. The resulting book, Timestamp: The Daily Practice of Poetry, is a triumph, simultaneously entertaining, provocative,...
