| Dan McCabe | Moulin Rouge! plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 24th through Sunday, January 26th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Baz Luhrmann isn’t your typical “great” filmmaker. His style hits audiences like a jackhammer. Moulin Rouge! (2001) is technically a period drama, but you could...

|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| Moulin Rouge! plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 24th through Sunday, January 26th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. I saw the “Lady Marmalade” music video before I saw Moulin Rouge!. Performed by a hot quintet of pop-singing ladies (Missy Elliot, who I admired for smooth dance moves;...

|Jillian Nelson| During the summer of ‘92, right before her senior year of high school, my mother moved out of her parents’ home and into her great aunt’s basement which she rented for fifty dollars a month. Her senior year she paid for everything on her own: school supplies, sports equipment...

| Dan Howard | Eyes Wide Shut plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 17th through Sunday, January 19th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. There’s certainly something about the holiday season that strikes a chord with filmmakers. Whether it’s Todd Hayne’s Carol, Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, or Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang...

|Andy Strudevant| The depth of annoyance that a lot of movie people felt about this subject is a little harder to parse from a quarter-century later, because I think movie people are supposed to be a little bit more broad-minded and populist these days. But man, it’s worth remembering...

|J.R. Jones| There’s obscene, and there’s obscene. When standup comedian Lenny Bruce, worn down by years of prosecution for narcotics possession and obscene language in his nightclub act, died of a morphine overdose in August 1966, police gave news photographers a five...

|Ed Dykhuizen| For the first half of the 20th century, all movies were made for everyone. There was no rating system, so everything had to be OK for both kids and adults. And there weren’t that many options on a particular day. You might have a choice of a western or a comedy...

|Penny Folger| To Die For plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, released in 1995, showcases a bristlingly ambitious woman named Suzanne Stone, played by Nicole Kidman, who will stop at nothing...

|Malcolm Cooke| The Others plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. Director Alejandro Amenábar wrote the music for his third film, The Others (2001), just like he had for all of his previous projects. He was admittedly still an...

|Ben Jarman & Carey Nadeau| To Die For plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, January 10th through Sunday, January 12th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information. The teens in this film are not realistic. That’s the only negative thing I thought about Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, but I...

|Allison Vincent| So, firstly, this is how I feel/sound when I talk about Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera, and Cabaret: ... I get weird, loud, and oddly academic, and there is a lot of red string. Here’s (in a nutshell) why:

|Ryan Sanderson| Rushing Towards Death was the title W.R. Burnett originally wanted for High Sierra, the book that became the movie that made Humphrey Bogart into a movie star (and, more circuitously, John Huston into a director). That first—I would argue more evocative—title came from...

|Andrew Neill| Let’s get a potentially uncool but nonetheless true thing about me out of the way right now: I am a huge fan of the American film director Wesley Wales Anderson. You probably know him as Wes Anderson. He’s one of my favorite directors—gotta be in the top three...

|Dan Howard| By the start of 1962, Yasujirō Ozu had already directed a staggering 53 feature films that spanned a 33-year journey. With classics like Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959) to lesser-known gems like The Munekata Sisters (1950), the deeper you dive...

|Finn Odum| Eons ago (in 2019), when I was but a spritely, youthful child (20 and in college), I wrote about the 1984 controversial Claus classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. Back in the days of zinger conclusions and quippy comments on Santa Claus’s sanctity, I had dreams...

|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Japan seems to have a magnetic pull for educated Millennials. The USA, it seems, is the antithesis of the orderly, tidy, traditional, technologically advanced, and ritualistic culture of Japan in the minds of many. Whenever anyone begins recounting...

|MH Rowe| On Dangerous Ground (1951) might appear at first to be one of the more unbearably melodramatic film noirs ever produced. Its ending, or really the ending of the ending—the film’s final scene—threatens especially to pull all that has preceded it down into the depths of pure...

|Steve Rybin| The Trylon’s “Ozu in Color” series presents four of Yasujirō Ozu’s color films made near the end of the director’s career (1958 to 1963). These films cover what is for Ozu familiar narrative ground: fathers and mothers give away daughters to marriage; generational conflicts pit...

|Nate Logsdon| “This is a true story. It was photographed where it happened.” In two sentences, the onscreen statement before the opening credits of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear—the first picture produced by her production company The Filmakers—distills the ethos of independent cinema...

|Doug Carmoody| Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault on screen. Ida Lupino’s Outrage has a concept ready-made for modern independent film glory. A famous actress writing and directing a blunt, socially aware film about sexual assault has been a recipe for several of the buzzier and better-received films of the...

|Nate Logsdon| Wim Wenders couldn’t find reality anywhere. In the Spring of 1983, he had traveled to Tokyo to mark the 20th anniversary of Yasujirō Ozu’s death. He was seeking the Japanese world that appeared so luminously in the films of that great director, whose body of work...

|Dan Howard| In this day in age, television is just as common and almost essential to our daily lives as food or nature. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just always been around, but in fact, the first concept of what would ultimately become television, Facsimile Transmissions, was introduced...

On the surface, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about a homicidal maniac who hitches a ride with two friends on their way to Mexicali as murder looms just around the corner. Even the onscreen title that opens the film indicates its true...

|Patrick Clifford| THIS IS THE TRUE STORY OF A MAN AND A GUN AND A CAR. THE GUN BELONGED TO THE MAN. THE CAR MIGHT HAVE BEEN YOURS OR THAT YOUNG COUPLE’S ACROSS THE AISLE.  WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE NEXT SEVENTY MINUTES COULD HAVE...