Author: Josh Bell

At first, it seems like the one-joke premise of Space Station 76 will get old quickly: It’s a sci-fi comedy set on a space station in 1976 — or, rather, a space station as might have been envisioned by filmmakers in 1976. So the characters all wear loud ’70s fashions, smoke and drink incessantly, hold […]

Nothing in Bobcat Goldthwait’s history as a filmmaker or an actor indicates that he’d be the guy to make a found-footage horror movie about Bigfoot, but given the distinctive edge he’s brought to his efforts as a writer-director (including Sleeping Dogs Lie and World’s Greatest Dad), there’s reason to hope he might bring something original […]

Only at the Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival can you show up 10 minutes before the screening of an obscure Rosalind Russell comedy and end up sitting in the front row because there are no other seats available. That’s how my experience at this year’s festival started, and while the front row is probably […]

It might not be entirely fair to judge the two volumes of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac separately, since they were produced and originally planned as a single entity. But whether by design or by chance, Volume I and Volume II are split in a way that shows obvious contrasts, and while their story isn’t complete […]

In movies like Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville, Lars von Trier puts his pure-hearted heroines through almost unimaginable torment, piling misery on top of misery until it’s impossible to believe that they won’t suffer complete mental and physical breakdowns (and sometimes they do). Von Trier often claims that these female protagonists […]

It’s not uncommon for movie studios to produce cheap straight-to-video “sequels” to well-known movies based solely on name recognition, often with virtually no connection to the originals. At first glance, you might expect Showgirls 2: Penny’s From Heaven to be one of those movies, trading on the notoriety of Paul Verhoeven’s infamous 1995 flop, which […]

It’s sort of hard to believe that anyone could make the dopey 2010 French thriller Love Crime more ridiculous, but Brian De Palma manages to do just that with Passion, a mostly faithful remake. The final movie directed by Alain Corneau, Love Crime is a trashy, pseudo-titillating story about a ruthless corporate shark (played by […]

So breezy that it threatens to blow apart entirely, the coming-of-age dramedy The Kings of Summer has some sweet moments but ends up feeling wholly inconsequential. The self-consciously quirky supporting characters take away from the emotional impact of the central story, about teenage best friends Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso), who decide to […]

As far as dumb ideas go, impersonating your dead junkie roommate to collect a mysterious inheritance from a shady lawyer is pretty high up there. But the protagonists of the moronic thriller Rushlights don’t seem to see anything wrong with it, at least not until they are in way over their heads and being targeted […]