Recommended Film Screenings
-
There’s no better argument for and against the career of director Tim Burton than his hit 1990 fable Edward Scissorhands, which stars Johnny Depp as the title character, a sharp-fingered but otherwise cuddly misfit suffering for the sins of a narrow-minded American suburb. The movie is visually stunning, and amusing in an obvious way early on, but it gets increasingly heavy-handed and dark as Burton tries to make a point about the perils of conformity in a way that ...
-
A movie that combines Halloween with Christmas seems like a shamelessly commercial idea, like a between-holidays holiday dreamed up by Hallmark at its most sinister. But the two come together surprisingly well in 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Tim ...
-
After his touching 1994 masterpiece Ed Wood—the other half of Sunday’s double feature—Tim Burton plunged back into dizzying perversity with 1996’s Mars Attacks! Stumpy, ugly Martians in flying saucers—certainly no match for the sleek creatures and death ships of Independence Day, released just months before—arrive and start wrecking the world one puny laser blast at a time, ranting in “ack ack ack!” voices and performing bizarre scientific experiments for laughs. Burton masterfully hurls a ...
-
Terry Gilliam’s status as a madcap visionary isn’t always a flattering proposition, because sometimes his movies are so frenetic they get away from him. Gilliam’s 1985 sci-fi masterpiece Brazil rides on that razor’s edge of coherence, but his view of our dystopian future is darkly funny and scarily plausible. In an Orwellian future where the people are controlled by the state, Jonathan Pryce is a technocrat forced to wade through a hopelessly outdated and bloated bureaucracy ...
-
The shock that greeted Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho cannot be understated, and not just because of its famed shower scene. What’s truly surprising is that it has the temerity to kill off its presumptive lead character. After ...
-
Brooklyn trio These Are Powers swoops through a minimalist noise void with feisty drums, shuddering guitars, and the half-beastly, half-tuneful vocals of Anna Barie--not to mention some truly harrowing bass textures courtesy of Pat Noecker, a former and founding member ...
-
Masters at taking jabs at neo-cons before delivering a surprise uppercut to liberals, South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone pull no punches in their puppet polemic Team America: World Police, lampooning American jingoism but reserving its most trenchant ...
IN THEATERS
sort by:
Film features
-
Blog Sonic Youth pick favorite Criterion Collection movies, including one with wheat
November 16, 2009 | 1:28pm -
-
feature Acting a fool: Jerry Lewis’ expertly timed antics
November 11, 2009 | 12:00am -
-
Just Announced Sundance mini-fest to take place Jan. 28 in eight cities, including NY
November 6, 2009 | 4:58pm -
-
feature So bad they're great: 5 surprisingly solid Roger Corman films
October 28, 2009 | 12:00am -
