Cult Movies

Forty years ago, four men put on uniforms, came up with a catchy logo — a startled specter in a red circle with a slash going through it, no big whoop — strapped on some proton packs and saved New York City from an evil deity holed up in a penthouse. They were brave, they were bold, they were smartasses and, we can’t stress this part enough, they weren’t ‘fraid of no ghosts. It’s not a Stay Puft Marshmellow Man-sized leap to say that Ivan Reitman‘s original Ghostbusters changed Hollywood blockbusters. The idea of…

Tommy Chong has his cellphone pressed up tight against his ear, trying to find out where the person on the other end of the line is; at 85, his hearing isn’t what it used to be. Sitting across from him in the booth of a restaurant, located right off the lobby of an extremely busy hotel in downtown Austin, Texas, is Richard Marin. The 77-year-old actor is usually known by his nickname, “Cheech,” and he’s perusing the menu while his longtime partner loudly issues directions regarding where to meet up later. Marin orders…

You remember Road House, right? The 1989 movie where Patrick Swayze is a professional New York City bouncer imported to Missouri to work at the most raucous road house bar in the Show Me State? The kind of film in which the hero does tai chi, reads philosophy and coos Zen koans like “Pain don’t hurt,” and the bad guy utters bon mots like, “I used to fuck guys like you in prison?” (It was a different time.) Direct by the appropriately named Rowdy Harrington, this finely aged slice of cinematic Velveeta remains the…

From music docs on Mogwai and Stax Records to Dev Patel kicking ass — what you need to catch at this year's Austin-based film & TV festival And on the fifth day, the Lord did look upon Austin, that small oasis of weirdness in central Texas, and said: Let there be a festival, in which indie musicians and technology wonks and all sorts of cutting-edge cultural freaks might gather, so as to share tomorrow’s sounds and ideas for shaping the future and messy plates of spare…

A road trip. A mix-up. A fast-talking hero, prone to tossing off bewilderingly verbose sentences. Some criminals who run the gamut from eccentric to psychotic to painfully inept. (Sometimes, they’re all three at once.) Dangerously sudden violence. Dangerously dark humor. Dangerously outrageous hairdos. The feeling that you’re watching a vintage film noir story run through a Looney Tunes filter. You are in the presence of a Coen brothers movie — whaddaya need, a road map?! Actually, some sort of GPS system would be…

So, where were we? Oh, right. House Atreides, the noble family that oversaw the rule of the spice-rich planet Arrakis, is no more. Its patriarch, Duke Leto, is dead. His heir Paul Atreides, and the young man’s mother Lady Jessica, are both presumed to have been killed as well. House Harkonnen, led by the corpulent and cybernetically enhanced Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, will once again take control of Arrakis and mine its deserts for its prized — and extremely hallucinogenic — resource. Unbeknownst to the Baron, his…

You may know Kōji Yakusho as the oyster-slurping mystery man from the noodle-Western extraordinaire Tampopo (1985). Perhaps you remember him as the depressed suburbanite who ballroom-dances his blues away in the international feel-good hit Shall We Dance? (1996). He’s the reformed felon in the Cannes-winning character study The Eel (1997), a former muse to filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa in the late Nineties and early aughts, the familiar face who graced Hollywood fare like Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) and Babel (2006), and —…

It’s easy for children to be feel apprehensive and overwhelmed by the world. (To be fair, it’s also easy for a lot of adults to feel apprehensive and overwhelmed by the world, which, you know — thank god for therapists!) You could do a lot worse than to show a fretful youngster Orion and the Dark, a Dreamworks/Netflix animated movie that mounts a full-frontal attack on the notion of fear as a default state of mind. Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is an 11-year-old who’s afraid of a lot of things: cancer, clowns, dogs,…

You do not fuck with Mads Mikkelsen. There are a number of takeaways to be had from The Promised Land, the excellent prestige drama-cum-bloody payback flick straight outta Denmark. The rich in 18th century Scandinavia were as entitled, immoral, and sociopathic as they are in 21st century everywhere. Just because you’ve fought for a country doesn’t mean it will give you a fair shake. Few things fill a big screen better than a grand, historical epic brimming with sweeping vistas, action-packed set pieces, and heroic…

There are few movie-marketing gimmicks more enticing than the suggestion of a secret — a twist or revelation so shocking, so earth-shaking that it changes everything you thought you knew about a film, its characters, yadda yadda yadda. The audience’s curiosity is piqued, then they become co-conspirators: Once you know, don’t ruin it for those who don’t. Hitchcock famously used this trick for the meta-trailer for Psycho, then proceeded to deliver not one but two of the most jaw-dropping turnabouts in cinema history.…