|Yuval Klein| At the Mexico–U.S. Border, gangsters and police animate a caustic criminal underbelly. The protagonist, Mike Vargas, is a respected Mexican criminal prosecutor who crosses over to his American newlywed’s home country at the precise moment of an… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| La casa lobo (2018, released in English as The Wolf House) is one of those films based on or inspired by fact that sends you scurrying to the internet to read aghast secret histories you never knew. In this case the history turns out to be a sickening account of… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| I. Gringos en Arica. The first of my three weeks in Arica, a city on the Chilean-Peruvian border, was spent in a beachside hotel. We had free breakfast in the mornings, a pool overlooking the ocean, and most importantly, a bar just a five-minute walk away. Many of us were… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| As quiet and downbeat as it is—as suspicious of institutional authority as it is—The Verdict (1982) is not quite the post-Watergate courtroom drama it appears to be. It traffics instead in a variety of chastened heroism, the kind that comes from finding out that… Continue reading
|Courtney Kowalke| When I was 13, I was obsessed with the Disney Channel cartoon Kim Possible. The title character was a high school student extracurricular enthusiast with a particular penchant for cheerleading who also flew around the world to fight crime. I was in… Continue reading
| Matthew Tchepikova-Treon | Beyond the hardbody brass hits, kettle drums, soaring guitars, and motoric basslines (that nowadays punctuate every last over-edited theatrical trailer to death), action movie music comes in many forms. In the 1970s, performers like J.J. Johnson (Across 110th Street), Johnny Pate… Continue reading
|Michael Popham| When people see the movie Zardoz for the first time, they usually walk out of the theater with a lot of questions. Chief among them is, “What the fuck was that all about?” I’ll admit this isn’t a movie for everyone. But hear me out: Zardoz is not just a perfect example of 1970s… Continue reading
|Zach Staads| So, the civilization we know today is coming to an end and the enlightened intelligentsia want to use the end of the world as a playground for their own disaffected experiments and whims as they figure out immortality and aren’t sure what to do with the cruder… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| The Goodbye Girl played on daytime television with some regularity while I was growing up. Either that or I just caught it the one time and it left an enduring impression. It’s hard to say which it was when scanning back through my memories of childhood, but I remember Richard Dreyfuss playing guitar, trying to soothe 10-year-old… Continue reading
|Veda Lawrence| For someone whose exposure to Holocaust literature has come mostly from the diary of Anne Frank, or the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, or even Life is Beautiful, a film like The Night Porter stands as a stark and offensive antithesis to the almost sanitized narratives that… Continue reading
