"Despite focusing on a self-absorbed jerk contemplating murder most of the runtime, A New Leaf is a genuinely sweet film. Maybe that’s due to the studio interference—May’s cut included an excised subplot casting marriage as a life sentence—but the film’s ending and Henry’s slow growth remained unchanged from May’s vision. At one point after getting soaked to the bone, Henry asks Henrietta 'Still cold?' Henrietta says, 'I feel a little warmer,' a perfect summation of A New Leaf’s effect." Featured by Danielle Burgos
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Stockholmsnatt 1987
Screen Slate's friends at Le Cinema Club recently invited us to pick a film for their weekly streaming selection.
"Amid the proliferation of stereos and VCRs in the 1980s, Sweden’s youth culture was taken with The Karate Kid, horror movies, and hip-hop, ushering a new wave of counter-culture and youth rebellion. This also led to moral panic over videovåld (“video violence”), Sweden’s own version of the UK “Video Nasties,” which elevated movies by homegrown exploitation filmmakers like Mats Helge Olsson…
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Dead Mountaineer's Hotel 1979
"With a fresh restoration, the film’s previous murkiness is removed to restore its intended high-style chiaroscuro, revealing a noir/sci-fi crossover with a banger soundtrack to a wider audience." Featured by Danielle Burgos
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The Devil's Rain 1975
Featured by Dana Reinoos (aka dana danger)
"The Devil’s Rain is the exemplar of a certain kind of 1970s American horror movie: slow, weird, 'plotless,' and depressing. It’s the kind of movie that made Roger Ebert say, “The problem is that the material's stretched too thin… No doubt that's why we get so many barren landscapes filled with lonely music and ennui.” But what could more accurately depict the hollowed-out core of the post-Nixon American soul than nothingness, ennui, and a deal with the devil?"
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Chris and Bernie 1975
"While watching, it’s difficult as a queer person, namely a lesbian, to not note how these women inadvertently fulfill lesbian fantasies of domesticity and a household that does not rely on a stark male presence or intrusion. Both young and in their 20s, they explain how their children were the result of relationships with men that didn't work out, and rather than struggle independently, they’ve found each other."
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Om Dar-B-Dar 1988
"Peerless in its vision and esoteric in its details, Om Dar-B-Dar is a movie that can hold true to the moniker of being 'unlike anything you’ve ever seen.'"
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Fatma 75 1975
"Part of 'Liberating History: Arab Feminisms and Mediated Pasts,' a streaming series presented by the Block Museum and programmed by Simran Bhalla and Malia Haines-Stewart, Fatma 75, the first non-fiction film by a Tunisian woman, is a formally nimble explication of the parallel struggles for Tunisian independence in the 1950s and women’s rights. Fatma is scheduled to deliver a talk on the subject to her class. Using this narrative device — a sort of unrestricted cinematic…
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The Stone Tape 1972
"In 1972, BBC Two presented a feature-length teleplay as part of its annual “A Ghost Story for Christmas” series of the ‘70s: The Stone Tape, directed by Peter Sasdy and written by Nigel Kneale. Kneale was already well-established as a television writer, having, amongst others, created science hunk Bernard Quatermass, who first made his appearance in British TV serials but was also the protagonist of several Hammer films, including The Quatermass Xperiment and, my personal favorite,…
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Wax, or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees 1991
"Terms like 'unclassifiable' are used regularly in description of works at the outer limits of genre, but rarely are they as justified as in the case of David Blair’s 1991 video Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, a cyberpunk prototype from the chrome heart of the Digital Age. Developed over a decade through technical exploration and chance operations in the New York Public Library, Blair laid an extrapolation of La Jetée atop a bedrock of Thomas Pynchon and came out with something closest to early Peter Greenaway — yet ultimately singular."
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Queen of the Damned 2002
"Queen of the Damned is by no means a good movie. ... However, the narrative and formal aesthetics of the Cliché-ridden film are momentarily suspended in 'Akasha’s Carnage.' This sequential disruption features Akasha, the mother of all vampires, newly awakened from her slumber by the power of the vampire Lestat’s rock music (Stuart Townsend performing music by Korn). Akasha seeks Lestat in a vampire goth club. When she enters this space she, despite these vampires being…
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White Zombie 1932
"A rough, downmarket film in style and spirit, White Zombie doesn’t feel like the kind of movie that should feature a newly minted Hollywood star, but it does feel like the kind of movie that couldn’t afford Karloff. Officially set in Haiti, but seemingly set in an inkwell, it stars Lugosi as 'Murder' Legendre, a voodoo master and sugar mill owner who controls a small army of mindless zombies. Looking like Satan himself with a unibrow…
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Baby the Rain Must Fall 1965
With an impressive lack of urgency, director Robert Mulligan details the blown last chance of a hardluck guitarist in the languorous Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965). This proto-American New Wave character study embodies its purgatorial southeast Texas setting in elliptical dissolves during which endless vistas bear down to swallow stars Lee Remick and Steve McQueen. Mulligan and screenwriter Horton Foote largely deverbalize the source material, Foote’s play The Traveling Lady, in favor of brooding atmosphere and seething closeups. If…