"You have to learn how to kill." In Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the vampires aren’t sexy. There’s nothing particularly interesting about them. They’re not Eurocentric romantics; they’re pure Americana, highway drifters chasing the night. They burn. They kill....
In a beautiful manifestation of native culture through film, The Pocahontas Reframed: Native American Storytellers Film Festival conveyed the importance of traditional storytelling in a world oversaturated with instantaneous information. This past weekend, veterans of the French Film Festival, as well as some new collaborators, pulled together...
In a celebration of native peoples and indigenous culture, Richmond will be hosting The Pocahontas Reframed: Native American Storytellers Film Festival (PRNASFF) this coming weekend. The three-day free event will be held at the Byrd Theatre will feature multiple films and performances all focusing on Native American peoples, culture, language,...
The following is RVA Magazine's continued coverage of Charlottesville's Virginia Film Festival this past weekend. Staff writer Kyle Shearin was on the scene to highlight some of the films from the three-day event. If you missed the first in the series, you can check that review out here. “Permanent”, a new film, comes from Virginian...
Based in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia, the Virginia Film Festival has celebrated the art of film for over 30 years and this past weekend, it continued its tradition of highlighting new features and documentaries, fresh takes on timeless classics, and local filmmakers. Staff writer Kyle Shearin attended the festival and in the...
Not exactly a modern-spin on an old fable, The Lure is a stirring, if fragmented coming-of-human tale of two sisters who happen to be carnivorous, singing, vampire-like mermaids. After being lured by a family of intriguing music performers, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszanska) two young, beautiful, mermaids find themselves the...
2017 has been the year David Lynch returned to our lives. After a decade-plus absence in making films, his signature series Twin Peaks resumed (after a seemingly foreseen 25-year hiatus), continuing to instill that special sense of enigmatic storytelling that’s often associated with the director and his work on and off the screen. While Lynch is...
Certain Women, director Kelly Reichardt’s modern pioneer-woman film not only explores the temporary trials and tribulations of its three contemporary women, conjured from the short stories of Maile Meloy, it also showcases how the gorgeous, wide-open, the Montana landscape ties into each central character’s own sense of loneliness and longing....
As political as it’s a social statement, writer and director Mike Leigh’s (Secrets and Lies, Happy-Go-Lucky) 1983 tragicomedy, Meantime, centers on the downtrodden poverty stricken Pollock family, amid the jobless working-class placed in the grim societal backdrop of Margaret Thatcher 1980’s Britain. The Pollock family; headed by unemployed grump...
As soon as I walked through the door of Strange Matter Sunday night, I heard the iconic Twin Peaks theme playing over the speakers. Soon after, it was interrupted by the “The Pink Room,” a hard rock jam that plays within the sleaziest of corners in the world of “Twin Peaks”. While I then realized that I had coincidentally walked in the room at...
