Recommended Film Screenings
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Director Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads' exhilarating Stop Making Sense is unlike any film made before or since (Demme's Storefront Hitchcock excepted), a concert movie that eschews backstage interviews and audience cutaways for the simpler pleasures of watching a band perform at the top of its game. Pop artists both, Demme and Heads frontman David Byrne collaborated on an evolving-stage concept that fuses clever, minimalist performance art with the accumulating narrative force of great cinema. Filmed over three nights ...
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Just two years after the calamitous 1972 Olympics in Munich, when Israeli athletes were taken hostage and later killed by Palestinian terrorists after a botched rescue attempt by German authorities, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, a brave examination of racial tension between natives and Arab immigrants. Inspired by Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows—which was again reworked to great effect by Todd Haynes for Far From Heaven—the film concerns the unlikely ...
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Though at first glance 1979’s The Muppet Movie may seem like a purely kid-centric affair, it predates the current crop of adult-friendly family films by decades. Deftly combining puns that were old when vaudeville was in style with meta-cinematic ...
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Jim Henson’s 1981 charmer The Great Muppet Caper offers up practically the world’s oldest love story: Boy meets pig. Boy frames pig as a jewel thief. Boy loses pig, and has all his leather-clad supermodel/cat-burglar sidekicks karate-chopped into submission by pig. But is the boy really feeling it? Probably not. While Charles Grodin does romance Miss Piggy during The Great Muppet Caper, even singing her a heartfelt love song, Grodin’s removed, condescending demeanor doesn’t really ...
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Though released internationally under the title Coeurs, a simple reference to the six lonely hearts that populate the film, the U.S. release of Alain Resnais' Private Fears In Public Places takes the original title of Alan Ayckbourn's play, which better evokes its graceful dichotomies. Ayckbourn and Resnais collaborated before with 1993's Smoking/No Smoking, which told two variations on the same story, but here, the dividing lines are much more subtly integrated into the writing and the ...
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For co-directors Jim Henson and Frank Oz, 1982’s wondrous live-action fantasy The Dark Crystal was a large, risky step away from their stable of familiar characters from Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and the theatrical Muppet movies. The five-year ...
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A McDonald’s training video called “Inside And Outside Custodial Duties” first sparked Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett’s interest in the weird videotapes hiding in Dumpsters and at garage sales. With the Found Footage Festival, they share their found ...
IN THEATERS
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Film features
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feature Six musicians other than Rob Zombie who had the gall to make a feature-length film
November 20, 2009 | 12:00am -
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Daily Agenda Nov. 16: Dir En Grey, Labyrinth
November 16, 2009 | 12:00am -
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Daily Agenda Nov. 9: Cassette From My Ex
November 9, 2009 | 12:00am -
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Inventory It's about the music, maaan: Bands from Muppets history with inspired roots
November 6, 2009 | 12:00am -
