Thief: That One Last Job and the American Dream
How Hitchcock Changed Horror: Psycho at Sixty-Six
The Transformative Power of Girl on Top: Death, Sex, and Agency in The Terminator
Thief: That One Last Job and the American Dream
|Sophie Durbin| “Frank unfolds his wallet to place the letter inside. A tattered paste-up collage is there, too. He opens it. There's a white house from a magazine. A cut-out Cadillac is glued in front. Bits and pieces of trees are drawn in with green Pentel. A small baby from a Gerber food ad...
How Hitchcock Changed Horror: Psycho at Sixty-Six
|Clare Brownlee| Hitchcock is considered one of the enduring masters of the horror genre, and his 1960 film Psycho is no exception to that renowned filmography. It not only started a new kind of horror movie entirely, but maintains a legacy as one of the greatest in the genre. I’m not...
The Transformative Power of Girl on Top: Death, Sex, and Agency in The Terminator
|Chelli Riddiough| The Terminator isn’t a very horny film, unless you’re into feathered mullets and homicidal Austrians. But inside this ‘80s action thriller lives a love story, and not one, but two, very weird sex scenes. That’s enough to catapult it into a genre I call “cyberspunk.” When The Terminator begins, our protagonist...
Shark Cents: Deep Blue Sea’s Place in the Value of Warner Bros. Discovery
|Ben Jarman| Memories of Deep Blue Sea’s initial release still stick with me even though I never went to see it. I remember the smart shark gimmick and Samuel L. Jackson yelling, “Just what the hell did you do to those sharks!” in the trailer. I also remember...
“I’m Mad As Hell!”Network And The Profits Of Rage
|Wil McMillen| Network plays in at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, March 27th, through Sunday, March 29th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. My first day as a national news photographer was December 19, 1998, one of the most important and crazy days that nobody ever talks about....
Toward a Cinema of Noise: Demonlover (2002)
|Natalie Marlin| Noise was roiling in Olivier Assayas’s blood as the 20th century neared a close. At the end of his 1996 film Irma Vep, the director of the film-within-a-film has disavowed his initial attempt at a conventional filmmaking style. The star has left the picture. The narrative is...
They Live in the Twin Cities
|Lucas Vonasek| John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) begins bleakly. Train horns moan as they clatter along the rails, surveillance helicopters chop through the air above in staccato, and smog drapes a city dominated by monolithic buildings clad with corporate logos. These structures...
On the Road to Matewan
|Nate Logsdon| On January 5, 1970, Jock Yablonski was found dead in his home alongside the bodies of his wife and adult daughter. They had been shot six days earlier, on New Year’s Eve. Yablonski was a Pennsylvania coal miner who became...
The Badlands of Downtown LA
|Brogan Earney| If you’re like me and you grew up in Minnesota in the 90s or early 2000s, then we can all agree that Gordon Bombay was the shit. I first saw the Mighty Ducks films when I was 6 years old, and I quickly latched onto the character and looked up to his methodology, and I wasn’t even a hockey player. Over time, I realized that...
The Tragedies Play Well: Akira Kurosawa’s Three-Time Love Affair with Shakespeare
|Dan Howard| Before anything was “Lynchian,” “Altmanesque,” or “Kafkaesque,” it was “Shakespearean.” For the last four centuries, William Shakespeare’s deep-seated insight into the emotion and moral complexity of the human experience continues to enthrall audiences to this very day. Every actor...
Shout Out to Ellen Ripley: How Regular Heroes Inspire Us in Our Darkest Times
|Allison Vincent| When I initially pitched this idea for Alien to Perisphere, I intended to write a snarky, humor-laden essay about the trope of smart women who are ignored in horror/sci-fi films until the very loud, usually mustachioed men who did the ignoring succumb to their dumb, ...
A Lengthy and Mundane Explanation of the Fashion Hierarchy of Men in Brazil’s Well-Oiled Government Machine and Absolutely, Positively, 100% Nothing Else
|Zach Staads| If you really want to make a statement, affect some real change and be an upstanding, ambitious member of the bureaucratic body that keeps the lights on*—you should know the importance of bureau fashion and the importance it plays in...
Human Enough
|Harry Mackin| "Did you ever take that test yourself?" Whenever an institution of power has wanted to exploit, enslave, or just murder another group of people, they've gotten away with it by convincing everyone else that group isn't really human. There have been...
I am the One and Only: Moon and the Advent of Loneliness
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| In 2020 when COVID-19 shut down most of our social connections, I, like many caregivers, was the opposite of lonely. While so many were alone at home, I was inundated with constant human interaction. While I had purpose...
“That Means You Don’t Talk”: Michael Mann’s The Insider
|Steve Rybin| Four years separate Michael Mann’s crime drama Heat (1995) and his next movie, The Insider (1999). While Heat’smonumental pairing of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is considered by many to be the highlight of the director’s career, The Insider remains the Mann film...
The Art of the Reference in Who Framed Roger Rabbit
|Jackson Stern| I remember when I was eleven or twelve and I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit for the first time. Around the age of ten, I caught the cinephile bug after discovering classics like King Kong and Casablanca but before that
Michael Clayton and Tony Gilroy’s American Conscience
|Ryan Sanderson| Michael Clayton plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, March 1st, through Tuesday, March 3rd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire, you build egos the size...
Loc-Nar Never Stood a Chance
|Elizabeth Mathers| My (unknowing) introduction to Heavy Metal (1981) was South Park's Season 12, Episode 3 "Major Boobage." An absolutely transcendent piece of comedy. I know others also took this episode as an entry point into finding one of the greatest animated films. Heavy Metal is the gift that keeps on giving—great art,...
CARTOONS! CHAOS! CLASSIC ROCK! How HEAVY METAL Almost Became What I Wanted—and Why That Almost Matters
|Jay Ditzer| The reputation of the animated cult classic Heavy Metal rests on promises it largely can’t keep. Sure, it’s full of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll, at least superficially. What it actually delivers is something more revealing. The film is deeply of its era, which is both a strength and a weakness.
Folsom Prison Plays Itself
|J.R. Jones| Opened in 1880, about 12 miles north of San Francisco, Folsom State Prison occupies the former site of a mining camp along the American River. The original prison buildings and walls were constructed with hand-cut granite from the surrounding hills, which gives...
When The Wind Blows and How Nostalgia Lies to Us
|Wil McMillen| Everyone is scared. Everyone is broke. Unemployment is skyrocketing. There’s a madman in the White House who is threatening to blow up anyone who looks at him wrong. It’s 1983, and I’m eight years old. Nostalgia for the 1980s is amusing to me. The 80s, at least the early 80s...
Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer Could Make Anything Interesting
|Reid Lemker| Sometimes, it’s a miracle that films get made, and RKO’s 1949 film, The Big Steal, is one of those miracles. Directed by Don Siegel and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and William Bendix, The Big Steal was originally conceived as a vehicle for RKO star George Raft, but...
Toonami Days: How Anime Like Vampire Hunter D Saved a Small Town Kid
|Andrew Neill| The lights are out except for the TV. Outside of its pulsing glow, the bedroom is painted with deep blue shadows, which extend through the window, out onto the snowy front yard, across the icy street, a few blocks of civilization, and then miles and miles...
My Short Bestselling Memoir about the Japanese Animated Film Vampire Hunter D
|MH Rowe| A lot of art seems gruesome and tasteless when you’re twelve or thirteen years old. It repels and attracts you for exactly that reason. Later, when you’ve reached maturity or thereabouts and are better equipped with the faculty of judgement, you may have a...
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...