Editor’s Note: RVA Magazine is proud to partner with Virginia PrideFest, happening this Saturday, September 12, and to produce the annual Pride Guide celebrating Richmond and Virginia’s LGBTQ+ community. You can download the 2026 Pride Guide HERE. We’d also like to...
“Look around you, this is the uprising.” When Children of Men was released in 2006, it flopped. It had nothing to do with the filmmaking. Visually, this is one of the most striking films of the last two decades. It flopped because the story was too real. The politics were too ambiguous. The prophetic vision touched too close to home. Audiences...
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 evening, unsure of exactly what I was looking for, until an all-black, barn-like...
"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. Nihilism is fundamental to their vampirism—a Vampira Americana, if I may be so bold. In...
"I love when movies are dangerous. Are they anymore? I don’t think so." We consume noise. We’ve lost the signal. The transmission is overwhelmed by “content,” not art. That’s the point. To wear you down. To accept mediocrity. The celebration of film and music has been sacrificed to the gods of marketing. Our search for meaning has been replaced...
There comes a time in every person's life when you have to ask the question: Should I spend an evening in close proximity with a 6'7" comic working through their personal issues? The answer, is of course, a resounding yes! Now that we're all living in this space together, we highly recommend you go see Drew Drevyanko at Reveler on May...
“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...
