Celebrating Community
Our tech-dominated society is generous with its glimpses of dystopia. But there’s something especially chilling about the captive audience meetings in the documentary Union, which screened at the New York Film Festival and is currently playing at IFC Center. Chronicling the fight of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), led by Chris Smalls, to organize the Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Staten […]
Red Hook is long overdue for its close-up. And this month, it gets one. Running November 1-10, the 2nd Annual Red Hook Community Cinema film festival showcases 25 films made in, about, or that feature the neighborhood. The series opens Friday, November 1 with Isaac Dell’s Boys at Twenty at 7 pm, followed by a costume party at 9. Like […]
The Origins of Lovecraft Country Lovecraft Country is one of HBO’s newest series based on author Matt Ruff’s 2016 best-selling novel, Lovecraft Country. Both the series and novel reference the work of another famous author, HP Lovecraft (Howard Phillips Lovecraft) whose earlier works made use of themes that dehumanized people of color. However, the HBO series created by Horror […]
Before I moved to New York, I worked for four years as a movie theater employee. My coworkers and I made minimum wage or a little more, and many could barely afford their rent during the best of times. For some, the lack of disposable income was tolerable only because their favorite recreational activity, by far, was watching movies, and […]
American Dharma Documentarian Errol Morris interviews former Trump advisor and generally repugnant pit-stain Steve Bannon. In The Fog of War and Known Unknowns (films Bannon cites as personal favorites), Morris walked through Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeldt’s personal biographies to examine the personal and structural failings of American empire. Bannon, who prefers bloviating about his favorite films and his own […]
Imagine, if you can, an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse directed by John Waters. The manic energy of the gray-suited man-child’s retro-kitsch house-slash-living-toybox would still rule – talking furniture and beehived visitors feel very on-brand for the Pope of Trash – but it would arrive with a more lacerating, NSFW edge. Miss Yvone might be closer to Waters Dreamlander Divine than heteronormative […]