"That’s the biggest thing. You have to deal with rejection every day and not lose enthusiasm. You have to stop thinking about the rejection." Derrick Borte might be a Hollywood director, but he’s still a Virginia local. That connection becomes obvious the moment you...
“Dick Laurent is dead.” The one road you might never leave is David Lynch’s The Lost Highway. Released in 1997, between the cathartic black box of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the bruised dreamscape of Mulholland Drive, The Lost Highway might be Lynch’s low-key masterpiece. This film is a frontier: an interplay of visuals and sounds,...
In the Richmond of 2005, Teddy Blanks was everywhere—playing packed shows with Ross Harman as the pop duo The Gaskets, writing sharp film reviews and interviews for the early issues of RVA Magazine, and even acting in a short film that, for me, still holds personal weight. He brought with him the energy of a dance party, a quick mind, great...
After a night spent on the coziest sofa in all of Appalachia, we headed up early to the top of a university parking deck, parked beneath a sign that read “No Parking / No Loitering,” and lined up the shot—my director and me, just the two of us that morning to grab a simple scene of my character looking off into the mountains, being sure to...
“Everything seemed the same, but it wasn’t. It was a nightmare.” By 1978, the American Dream was officially dead. The counterculture of the ’60s and early ’70s had been absorbed into the mainstream, packaged and sold through a matrix of unlimited consumerism and second-rate marketing. The Vietnam War ended disastrously. Nixon had just...
When it comes to creating visual work that uplifts Richmond’s music scene, The Sunroom has quickly become a trusted name. I caught up with Michael Thibodeau, the founder, creative director and producer at The Sunroom, to talk about how they started, their growing body of work with local artists, and what’s coming next. “So I’m Michael Thibodeau....
The enchanting world of Studio Ghibli returns to Richmond this week as Studio Ghibli Fest takes over the historic Byrd Theatre. Kicking off Monday, March 31 with a screening of Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), the fest brings a lineup of beloved animated films that have defined generations — and there's more magic ahead all week long. A bit of a...
Another screening of No Other Land—an Oscar-winning documentary directed by both Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers—is set for Friday, March 28, at 4 p.m. at The Byrd Theatre. Recently winning for Best Documentary Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, the film has been described by its directors as “an act of resistance on the path to justice...
Let’s get down to business: This film is fucking bananas. Not your average store-bought bananas, not even your farm-to-table free range bananas, this is 160 metric tonnes of high-explosive, slow-motion, dual pistol, Hong Kong bullet spraying bananas; shipped directly to you from the inner recesses of Director John Woo’s unfathomable id. Whatever...
Given our current political predicament, no line in cinema feels more relevant than when Bob Hauk, the police commissioner in Escape from New York, says to Snake Plissken, “The president’s gone missing.” To which Plissken coolly responds, “President of what?” Released in 1981 and directed by John Carpenter, Escape from New York, is arguably...
