Off of Broad Street, deep in Scott’s Addition between warehouses and alleyways, is a black hole in the wall filled with music, vintage VHS, and (perhaps most importantly) Richmond’s preeminent collection of horror-themed pinball machines. I came to Wax Moon on a cool...
Directed by Hal Ashby (Being There, Harold & Maude), 1975’s Shampoo is a multifaceted comical look at sex, politics, gender, and well, hair. Set on the day that Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, Shampoo stars Warren Beatty as George Roundy, a handsome lothario and hairdresser from Los Angeles who aspires to one day open his...
Last Friday night, The Virginia Film Festival offered the chance to catch what can only be described as a bona fide classic. Emerging as a tense and raw debut from the impossibly young Hughes brothers, 1993’s Menace II Society acts not only as cautionary tale, but a transfixing immersion into the darkest parts of Watts, Los Angeles in the early...
VCUarts’ Cinema is screening Michelangelo Antonioni’s bizarre counterculture masterpiece, Blow-Up, this Sunday at Grace St. Theater as part of VCU’s fall Cinematheque series. The film was hugely influential at the time of its release in 1966, and was the influential Italian director’s only brush with mainstream success. The film, based on a short...
Olivier Assayas’ 1994 Cold Water succeeds in not only being a brief portal into the doomed romance of two French teenagers deep in the throes of love, but also a deeply personal representation of a specific time in the director’s own adolescence. Originally conceived as a 50-minute made-for-television episode, Cold Water, or L’eau Froide, is...
Any holiday season, religious or otherwise, is a special time -- especially for TV networks. From the ringing of holiday bells to a 17-hour marathon of a killer in a goalie mask hacking people to death, it evokes a rush of nostalgia in viewers, and brings corresponding high ratings to networks. It's a reciprocal tradition that pop culture shares...
Before striking it big with the 1985 comedy-drama “Desperately Seeking Susan,” director Susan Seidelman made her independent feature debut with “Smithereens,” an entrancingly small tale with enough veracity and character that it was the first American indie to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival and eventually would live on in the punk film...
With his flair for visual storytelling, director Wong Hu helped redefine the martial arts genre of 1960s Chinese cinema, weaving together refined storytelling with dynamic action sequences. During the period, in a bid for more creative freedom from the political strife at the time and to fulfill his inner ambitions, Hu moved his production over...
Welcome to Virginia, motherland of presidents, a craft beer mecca, and in recent years, a burgeoning home for major motion pictures and television series. Virginia has always been a low key place for the film industry to come knocking when it needed a location. Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" was shot right here in the River City, along with the...
Jeff Goldblum is life; the air we breathe, the water we drink. His genre-defining performance in "Jurassic Park" as mathematician-turned-American hero Ian Malcolm, introduced a generation of teenagers in the 1990s to concepts like chaos theory, and the art of lounging casually with your shirt open; bringing sexy back when Justin Timberlake was...
