The Del Mar Theatre is back in business, and so is Paul Schrader with his new film, The Card Counter. Schrader’s stories often revolve around deeply damaged souls, their vices symptomatic of their troubled psyches; violence in Raging Bull, sex in Auto Focus, and alcohol in First Reformed. In The Card Counter, it’s gambling. […]

  Does Nicolas Cage have a thing for pigs and film noir? Possibly, considering he voiced the character of Spider-Man Noir opposite the animated pig, Spider-Ham. And now he’s starring in Pig, a compelling crime drama that makes liberal use of classic film noir tropes. Cage plays Rob, a legendary Portland-based gourmet chef who has […]

  In the mid-1960s, the New York Times published an exposé on Dan Burrows, a member of the American Nazi Party. As one might expect, Burrows held a deep-seated hatred towards Jews. What made his anti-Semitism so newsworthy was that Burrows kept his cultural heritage a closely guarded secret. Burrows, the New York Times revealed, […]

  Writer, director, and former UCSC Slug, Miranda July, burst onto the indie film scene in 2005 with Me and You and Everyone We Know. It won prizes at prestigious film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes, and July would be declared by Filmmaker magazine as one of the new faces of indie cinema. Talented […]

  For the longest time, ‘80s cinema was considered one of the worst decades in American film history. Compared to the gritty adult-oriented stories and antiheroes brought to the big screen by the New Hollywood auteurs of the ‘60s and ‘70s, ‘80s filmmaking represented, for the most part, a shift towards happy endings and less […]

  Imagine finding a sexual partner so adept at providing mind-blowing pleasure, you keep going back for more, despite the potential for personal harm. Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante has taken that dysfunctional relationship dynamic to fantastical extremes with his 2017 release, The Untamed, a compelling drama that explores the self-destructive side of our hedonistic tendencies. […]

  Mentioning Florian Zeller might not ring many bells in the U.S., but in his home country of France he’s a household name. Zeller published his first novel when he was only twenty-two years old. Now, at age forty-one, he’s an accomplished novelist, a highly acclaimed playwright, and, as of this year, an Oscar-winning filmmaker. […]

  The people of Denmark love to imbibe. It’s not surprising, then, that Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg originally conceived his Oscar-winning film, Another Round, as a celebration of alcohol and its place in history. Vinterberg’s nineteen-year-old daughter was originally cast in a small supporting role, but when she died tragically in a non-alcohol related accident, […]

  Over the years, many movies have been made about curmudgeonly loners who achieve some measure of redemption by virtue of being saddled with the responsibility of taking care of a child. In the 2019 comedy, Family, first-time filmmaker Laura Steinel takes that trite and well-worn concept into some new and clever directions. Typically, the […]

  The 2019 film, Gloria Bell, written and directed by Sebastián Lelio, is an English-language remake of his highly acclaimed 2013 Chilean film, Gloria. Even if you’ve already seen and enjoyed the original, the remake is still very much worth your time. As Lelio himself has put it, it’s the same melody performed by a […]