In Laurie Kahn’s illuminating documentary Love Between the Covers, we meet some of the world’s most popular authors, all of whom happen to write romance novels. One of them is Mary Bly, a Fordham professor and Shakespeare scholar who writes Regency r …Read more
These many things that Love Between the Covers’ documentarian, Laurie Kahn, says are true: First, romance novels bring in a respectable proportion of the publishing industry’s revenue. Second, they are not especially more ‘formulaic’ nor are they qua …Read more
What would life be like if we followed through on the desire of just packing up and living in the woods? Captain Fantastic, directed by Matt Ross asks this question as well as what would happen if you then raised a family. Viggo Mortensen plays Ben t …Read more
Early on in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, a makeup artist (Jena Malone) jokes to the ingénue, Jesse (Elle Fanning), that makeup shades are either named after food or sex, and that every girl must choose to be one or the other. She makes this …Read more
Zach Clark’s Little Sister is at once wise, fun, and down to earth. It understands that in the process of finding peace in the world, people draw from strands as diverse as Catholicism, politics (the film is set on the cusp of Obama’s first election) …Read more
Other filmmakers have reproduced vintage film aesthetics, but seldom with as much brio and intelligence as writer/director Anna Biller in The Love Witch. Though there are fleeting glimpses of modern technology, Biller has crafted The Love Witch as a …Read more
The Alchemist Cookbook In Joel Potrykus’s The Alchemist Cookbook, Sean (Ty Hickson) toils away tirelessly in his trailer attempting to crack the code to nature’s riches. Tucked deep in the woods of Michigan with just his cat Kaspar as company, he has …Read more
Little Men, from director Ira Sachs, is the kind of film that initially seems quite modest, from its short length and its understated style and its tight focus, in a city of millions, on two young boys and their short but significant friendship. Howe …Read more
BAMcinemaFest 2016 kicked off on the 15th, bringing another excellent slate of independent films to Brooklyn. This year features an intriguing mix of comedy and tragedy, fiction and documentary, throwbacks and flash forwards, and best of all films t …Read more
Kate Plays Christine Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine brilliantly uses the actor’s journey to investigate the 1974 on-air suicide of newscaster Christine Chubbuck. This documentary and fiction hybrid follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares …Read more
