An uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, the film confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design. An isolation-based fear (protect us from people not like us). A fear of irregularity (eat at McDonalds, you know what to expect). A fear of thought (turn on the television). A fear of self (don’t stop moving). By examining evacuated suburban and corporate landscapes, the film reveals a peculiarly 21st century hollowness… an emptiness born of our collective faith in safety and technology. This is a new genre of horror movie, attempting suburban locations as states of mind.
Tag: USA
Prometheus, on an Odyssean journey, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge in search of the characters of his imagination. After meeting the Muse, he proceeds to the “forest.” There, under an apple tree, he communes with his selves, represented by celebrated personages from the New York “underground scene” who appear as modern correlatives to the figures of Greek mythology. The filmmaker, who narrates the situations with a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, finds the personalities of his characters to have a timeless universality.
Nearly a decade before data confirmed that children of lesbian mothers thrive, this groundbreaking documentary showcased this vital truth. Shot largely in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, the film explores the diverse experiences of eight families facing custody battles, legal scrutiny and widespread societal bias. Through tender interviews and intimate footage with the parents and, most poignantly, their children, this documentary offers a heartrending portrayal of parental love, challenging stereotypes and normalizing an exceedingly valid family model.
When government attorney Mike Mandell begins to suffer from a mental disorder that periodically transforms him into another mobster personality known as “Sonny,” his strange behavior doesn’t escape the notice of a narcotics agent.
A girl, whose entire family was murdered by a serial killer, tries to isolate herself in New York City. Her fear escalates when the murderer starts stalking her on the internet. With his prison sentence about to end, the game of cat and mouse begins.
Blanche Dubois goes to visit her pregnant sister and husband Stanley in New Orleans. Stanley doesn’t like her, and starts pushing her for information on some property he knows was left to the sisters. He discovers she has mortgaged the place and spent all the money, and wants to find out all he can about her. Even more friction develops between the two while they are in the apartment together…
Fresh out of prison, Git rescues a former best friend (now living with Git’s girlfriend) from a beating at the hands of loan sharks. He’s now in trouble with the mob boss, Tom French, who sends Git to Cork with another debtor, Bunny Kelly, to find a guy named Frank Grogan, and take him to a man with a friendly face at a shack across a bog. It’s a tougher assignment than it seems: Git’s a novice, Bunny’s prone to rash acts, Frank doesn’t want to be found (and once he’s found, he has no money), and maybe Tom’s planning to murder Frank, which puts Git in a moral dilemma. Then, there’s the long-ago disappearance of Sonny Mulligan. What’s a decent and stand-up lad to do?
A rediscovered masterpiece, director Larry Clark’s As Above, So Below comprises a powerful political and social critique in its portrayal of Black insurgency. The film opens in 1945 with a young boy playing in his Chicago neighborhood and then follows the adult Jita-Hadi as a returning Marine with heightened political consciousness. Like The Spook Who Sat By the Door and Gordon’s War, As Above, So Below imagines a post-Watts rebellion state of siege and an organized Black underground plotting revolution. With sound excerpts from the 1968 HUAC report “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States,” As Above, So Below is one of the more politically radical films of the L.A. Rebellion.