American Gigolo: A Film Noir with 1980s Sheen?
The Gap in Lauren Hutton’s Teeth
Son of The White Mare: Formalistic Creativity Bursting Through Repression
American Gigolo: A Film Noir with 1980s Sheen?
|Penny Folger| Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, starts out with all the luster and flash of the 1980s though it was actually shot in 1979. Yet, stylistically, it preternaturally defines the decade that was to come. “It’s almost setting the...
The Gap in Lauren Hutton’s Teeth
|MH Rowe| The most interesting films tend to be those that go all the way into a gnarly little dreamworld. Not that the dreamworld of American Gigolo seems gnarly at first. The story begins by reveling in the easy brilliance of California sunshine. There’s no glare. No one sweats. A breeze...
Son of The White Mare: Formalistic Creativity Bursting Through Repression
|Ed Dykhuizen| Communism does not create a great environment for filmmaking. Communist governments tend to try to control everything, especially how people think. All art becomes state propaganda limited to a handful of party-friendly messages and forms. You have to...
First as Tragedy, Then as Tragedy
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| A young Richard Pryor sits inside a dark, nondescript bar. “California is a weird state,” he says, “because they have laws for pedestrians—you know like, you cross the street—they have laws for pedestrians, but they don’t have laws for people...
Giorgio Moroder: A Syllabus
|Sophie Durbin| would strongly recommend that everyone who’s anyone attend Berlin & the Trylon Present: A Celebration of Giorgio Moroder on Thursday, February 5. While our beloved Trylon Cinema does well at staying/excelling in its lane, the occasional creative foray into other local...
Gone with the Wind Rider: Shintoism in Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
|Lars Johnson| In the early 1980s, an idealistic Japanese animator entered into an agreement with a magazine to create a manga on the condition that it would not be turned into a feature film. The series immediately took off and became popular. The publisher, presumably caught...
Don’t Stomp On Bugs
|Noah Frazier| Bugs are gross. They look scary. They’ve got creepy legs and weird pincer mouths. A lot of them have an alarming amount of eyes. They bite, they sting. Sometimes they…let me double check my notes here…drink! your! blood! Like it’s a tasty treat to them!...
When in Rome: La Dolce Vita and Life’s Imitation of Art
|Courtney Kowalke| On October 21, 2025, around 1:00 pm, YourClassical MPR played Ottorino Respighi’s “Fountains of Rome.” I know because I was listening to the station in my car. As I drove through Uptown, I listened to Lynne Warfel wax poetic about the piece. She pointed out that the...
We’re All Buddies Here
|Devin Warner| I am so happy that this movie is being shown. While waiting in line to buy a ticket for the first 80’s Action Extravaganza at the Trylon, John wandered the line and asked everyone for movies they would like to see. My response was Shakedown, a buddy cop action...
It’s got Sam Elliott in it.
|Patrick Clifford| I recently bought a meatloaf and mashed potato sandwich from a gas station. I was on a road trip of sorts and had stopped out of need. For gas, a bathroom, and something to eat. The meatloaf and mashed potato sandwich was suffering under a heat lamp...
Okinawa, Baby: Exploration, Exes, & Extreme Private Eros
|Chelli Riddough| When my ex-boyfriend Chris and I were splitting up, we had a breakup photo shoot. Our friend Zoey came over and took a series of photographs of us in the living room: hugging, holding the cat, sitting side by side. At the time, my close friends...
The Shocking Direct Cinema of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On
|Ed Dykhuizen| Throughout the twentieth century, few documentaries managed to be both truthful and entertaining. Some were dry and deadly serious explications of important societal issues that, while enriching in the end, could feel a bit like homework. Others that provided thrills...
The Burnt-Out Artist and the Truth: Federico Fellini’s 8 ½
|Dan McCabe| Note: This article contains spoilers for Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. If you want to see the movie without knowing anything about it, stop now. Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) hates the science fiction movie he’s making. He thinks such b-movie genre fare is cheesy and...
Collectivization, Creation, and Composition: Scoring Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth
|Chris Polley| The “ooh, a project!” to “omg this is a huuuuge project” pipeline is real. In less than a week, my ambient post-rock band PRGRPHS will be performing our first live score for a silent film at the Trylon—Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1930 agitprop Rorschach test Earth...
“The Way The Whole Darned Human Solidarity Keeps Perpetuating Itself” One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Intentional Distancing, Accidental Empathy, & Rebellion as A Way To Pass The Time
|Phil Kolas| Can selfishness be intersectionally liberating? Can assholes help to free strangers? Those are two sentences saying the same thing, and I’m being repetitive only because I feel like I’m going to be fighting both of those conflicting impulses while I write...
Everyone Is Ridiculous and Everyone Is Beautiful: The Absurdist Humanism of Miloš Forman’s Taking Off
|Chris Polley| “It was a street-theater spectacular that never stopped,” Czech-turned-American director Miloš Forman said of his time spent in Central Park during the summer of 1970 before and during the filming of his debut stateside feature Taking Off. In particular...
Yippee-Ki-Yay Father Christmas
|Josh Carson| There is a seasonal debate borne directly out of and aged exactly alongside the internet. They even share the same lifecycles: At first it was wildly amusing. Next came innocuously controversial. Then it started to get annoying as too many people...
NERVOUS IN THE DESERT: Elizabeth Street alienation in Martin Scorsese’s Casino
|Ben Tuthill| Casino is the only entry in Martin Scorsese’s catalog you might confuse for self-parody. Three different voice-overs, a United Nations of ethnic slurs, so many Rolling Stones needle drops that at one point there’s a Rolling Stones song playing over another...
A Model with No Agency—Believing an Unreliable Narrator in Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child
|Terry Serres| Lou Andreas Sand (Faye Dunaway) is a former fashion model, retired after a nervous breakdown. Still vain and insecure, we find her holed up in her beachside aerie, where she is interviewed at length by a collaborator from her heyday, the photographer Aaron Reinhardt...
Something Else
|Patrick Clifford| It ain’t easy. The stuff of life. The things that continually seem to come with difficulty. Paying rent. Getting along with family. Loving somebody and accepting love in return. No matter how simple we try and keep it, we always complicate it by wondering if there...
The Masterpiece that Almost Was: The Quick and the Dead
|Ryan Sanderson| You’re Sharon Stone. Congratulations. You’ve just achieved massive stardom with Basic Instinct. Now Sony’s come knocking with a metatextual riff on Sergio Leone Westerns, the Clint Eastwood Man With No Name archetype written for a woman. You sign on...
The Family Stone: How Sharon Stone’s Vision Shaped The Quick and the Dead
|Courtney Kowalke| Writing this piece made me confront the fact that I have a thing for cowboys.Not the lifestyle, not in practice—I hate feeling dusty, straw and most crop pollens make me sneezy, and I’ve been scared of horses since I was ten and one bit my hand while I was feeding it...
No Revolution Without Love
|Azra Thakur| Sometimes, I seem to feel a gravity rise from the depths of the ages throughout the world. In myself and in others, I notice a tendency to flee from new problems, to take refuge in churches or counter-churches, to rely on what has been achieved, to be complacent, to...
The Propaganda Will See You Now
|MH Rowe| Some documentary films feel more like a document than an act of documentation. They may set out to study this or that topic, but in the end, they seem themselves like objects to study. To put it another way, I am inadequate to judge the regional history and politics presented...