Program Review: “Double Bill: Bill Gunn”
Featuring Ganja & Hess (1973, US, 110 minutes) and Personal Problems (1980, US, 165 minutes).
Available with subscription at MUBI.com. Both films also on Blu-ray and DVD now, and on criterionchannel.com in August.

The filmmaking career of author/playwright/actor Bill Gunn is often spoken of in tragic terms, and understandably so. His first film, Stop! (1970), was buried by Warner Bros. and has ...  read more

Program Review: “Directed by Sara Driver”
Featuring You Are Not I (1981, US, 49 minutes), Sleepwalk (1986, West Germany/US, 75 minutes), When Pigs Fly (1993, Germany/US, 94 minutes), and The Bowery (1994, US, 10 minutes).
Available with subscription at criterionchannel.com.

A sense of truth lies somewhere in Sara Driver’s films, but she doesn’t show you exactly where. Children wander abandoned street corners at night, a businessman barks, a woman affixes the leg of a haunted chair to her head; Driver openly mixes artificial, claustrophobic ...  read more

Film Review: Fatal Affair
Co-written and directed by Peter Sullivan. US, 2020, 89 minutes.
Available on Netflix.

Film critic Charles Bramesco keeps a ranked list of every “Netflix original” at Vulture, with more than ...  read more

Early into the pandemic, LGBTQ+ Twitter users joked about the inevitability of think pieces on “Queering the Quarantine” and the ways that social distancing would change the community’s sense of identity. Those were, in fact, published, and you’re more than ...  read more

Film Review: Family Romance, LLC
Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Japan/US, 2020, 89 minutes.
Available with subscription at MUBI.com.

Even after two decades of beguiling artistic turns, Werner Herzog’s lo-fi and seemingly tossed-off Family Romance, LLC is a fierce curveball. Shot by the director himself on prosumer ...  read more

Film Review: Palm Springs
Directed by Max Barbakow. US, 2020, 89 minutes.
Available with subscription on Hulu.

It’s easy to forget how earth-shatteringly funny the first run of SNL Digital Shorts were during the ’05-’09 period from “Dick in a Box” to “I’m on a Boat.” From a distance they might even seem like relics of the 4chan era—so to say a new movie is ...  read more

Film Review: The Killing Floor
Directed by Bill Duke. US, 1984, 118 minutes.
Available on June 19 at the “Virtual Cinema” pages of the Brattle Theatre, the Cabot Street Cinema, and other film institutions.

First thing you hear in The Killing Floor is voiceover narration delivered by a black man in the South circa September 1917, right before he catches a train for Chicago. “The war ...  read more

Film Review: The King of Staten Island
Co-written and directed by Judd Apatow. US, 2020, 136 minutes.
Available on VOD platforms.

Apatow’s previous film Trainwreck (2015) began with Amy (Schumer) sleeping with a caricature who’s listed in the credits as “Staten Island Oli” (Josh Segarra). He’s ...  read more

A shorter version of this article was published in an August 2019 issue of DigBoston. Given that much of the work in question is free online, now seemed a good time to add to it and publish here.

The first season of the television show  ...  read more