For those (like me) who blinked when Donnie Darko first tanked in theaters three years ago, the re-release of this brilliant coming-of-age sci-fi retro-80s masterpiece after the addition of twenty previously-cut minutes and several other re-adjustments by director/screenwriter Richard Kelly seems like the perfect opportunity to project backward-looking praise. If only a portal could open [...]

I learned to love shitty coffee at a dive called Moe’s over a summer of lifeguarding days and cottage party nights. It was bad enough to be considered good by us, and after a couple months’ worth of it hard and black while seated in the green vinyl booths, cabbies all around, anything else was [...]

Awkward: you’re a nerdy junior highschooler who has somehow convinced friends and some of their cooler friends to rent and watch a video at your house — True Romance, you all choose — and although your parents manage to stay out of the TV room for almost the entire time, your mother decides to walk [...]

In 1999 and with little effort, I coerced a fellow film nerd to see Being John Malkovich with me. It had shat rainbows all over my brain the week before, and he needed to experience the same. Glee crept over him, and an hour in he giddily asked me “what happens if he goes into [...]

There is recent Turkish film titled Uzak (which means Distant) that is, appropriately, about two men who are trapped inside themselves. Establishing a simple but effective formal technique of juxtaposing the human subject from bleak surroundings, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan divorces his human subjects from their austere environments. Although not nearly as existential as Van [...]