CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '12: F*CKLOAD OF SCOTCHTAPE (JULIAN GRANT, USA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20 & 10/23 WORLD THEATRICAL PREMIERE (previously available on Amazon Instant) Did the very title of Fuck...

BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: COMING OUT OF RETIREMENT

Every Sunday (or thereabouts) this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film th...

YEAR OF BLOOD: ECCE HOMO

I promise, I'm not trying to be the flippant atheist. My intellectual cover is that David Edelstein, in the article where he invented t...

GETTING PUNKED BY DAVID FINCHER

The easy part first: the David Fincher-directed and Steve Zaillian-scripted The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is better across the board than...

MINNESOTA NASTY

Honest to blog, homeskillet, Young Adult features people talking like actual human beings anywhere in the world really talk, using words th...

MANLY MEN DOING MANLY THINGS

The best parts of I Melt with You are in the first 40 minutes, when it's a story of four 44-year-old men indulging in a non-stop whirlw...

TO PROTECT (IRONICALLY) AND SERVE (ALSO IRONICALLY)

One of the best surprises of Oscar season way back in 2009 was Oren Moverman's directorial debut The Messenger , which tackled a well-wo...

PERSONAL FAVORITES, 1981: THE ANTI-MUSICAL

Pennies from Heaven was a ridiculous flop upon its initial release in the winter of 1981-'82, grossing considerably less than half of i...

CONFESSIONS OF A SEX MANIAC

By this point, Michael Fassbender has become so entrenched as one of The Great Actors of His Generation that it's kind of weird to think...

SOMETHING TO DO WITH DEATH

The subtitle of Werner Herzog's new documentary Into the Abyss declares itself to be "A tale of death, a tale of life", which...