Night Catches Us, Tanya Hamilton’s directorial debut, tells the story of Marcus (Anthony Mackie), a former Black Panther, returning to his old neighborhood four years after the disintegration of the movement and his personal life.

You can thank me for Pirates of Penzance. Thank me for the long-awaited DVD release of 1983 feature film adaptation of the Joseph Papp produced revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s finest work. I signed the online petition twice; played my Betamax dub of the original television airing until the tape warped and I couldn’t even transfer it to a new one.

[UPDATED] Watch Picture Me in a forgiving mood, and Sara Ziff’s documentary about her and her friend’s experiences as working models in the pre-recession fashion industry has a freshness to recommend it.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s ongoing retrospective of vampire films “Bela Lugosi’s Dead, Vampires Live Forever” resists defining the immortal amoral creature.

If there were stages of grief for our dying culture, they would have to move from hedonistic to scandalized to weary. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, Vikram Jayanti’s new documentary about the revolutionary pop and rock producer who defined sound as we know it, showcases all those many moods of the American public.

If you somehow have never seen Doctor Who since it debuted on November 23, 1963 (the day after the Kennedy assassination), now is a good time to start.

Capturing the paradoxical isolation and panoptic loss of privacy of prison life, Hunger rejuvenates the historical biopic.

I’ve often imagined what Angelina Jolie films would be like if they starred Lucy Lawless. Tomb Raider was in a manner envisioned for the Kiwi television icon—it’s a film based on a video game character, who was in turn inspired and made possible by the groundbreaking heroine Lawless created the year before in the syndicated television epic Xena: Warrior Princess.

With little question, the screwball comedies of the 1930s represent the zenith of madcap filmmaking in America. A full 14 of the 40 films shown in the Film Forum’s current “Madcap Manhattan” series date to the decade. These films created so many of the conventions of romantic comedy and so much of the mythology of New York that it’s surprising how lively and new they remain.

Even before his death on September 14th, a mood of tribute surrounded Patrick Swayze. He sat with Barbara Walters and talked about dying with as much charm as he’d ever done anything, and all of a sudden there wasn’t a dog in Hollywood mean enough to bite him. I shan’t be the first.

It’s a South African Alien Nation, using aliens as a vehicle to transfer cultural anxieties about the Other onto the ultimate bugbear.

Dead Snow is neither as groundbreaking or as heady you’ve been led to believe. But it’s big, and it’s bloody, and all in all, pretty awesome.

One of the most famous misnomers in American cultural history, “pre-code” has the same romantic character as pre-dawn. When sound revolutionized the film industry in 1929, the pro-censorship forces that had been working ad-hoc on state-by-state bases recognized that their jobs were about to get much harder.

Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst’s directorial debut The Education of Charlie Banks took a long time to find release after its festival showings in 2007. Having Durst’s name attached might not have helped its case.

All taste is indefensible. When we feel guilty about our pleasures we start trying to turn fiction into philosophy, usually to the detriment of both. So I’m always wary of making pop culture academic because it feels apologetic.

Like the unbroken snowscapes that set the stage for the entrancing Swedish film Let the Right One In, eternal does not equal unchanging for Eli, the forever pre-pubescent asexual vampire at the center of this harrowing film. Based on the novel of the same name, which in turn borrows its title from a breezy (for him) Morrissey song, Let the Right One In manages to weave a classically formal coming of age story into the iciest, yet most heartfelt, vampire film in some time.

There is a new wave in agitprop, but it’s familiar to the old timers. Referencing, conjuring, sentimentalizing, and recreating the passion of the New Left and eco-warriors, performance artists and marquis actors are engaged in a frenzied effort to get viewers to aim higher.

The final discovery of the Arthur Freed MGM Musical Factory, Cyd Charisse forestalled the end of an era with her hypnotic, sinuous, acrobatically improbable routines.

In one of his most straightforward magazine articles, “True Love: Groping for the Holy Grail,” science fiction legend Harlan Ellison signs up with a dating service—Great Expectations—which in the 1970s, was both technically cutting edge, and a cultural throwback. Utilizing five-minute video interviews, people were able to anonymously size up potential lovers and safely set up dates.

Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is triumphant throughout. Every shot is a masterpiece. The screenplay improves on an already tremendous book. The casting is phenomenal. The sound design is haunting, humorous, and never cute. Any of these is cause enough to see the film (especially the cinematography and editing), but there’s more. The film manages to dissociate words from meaning, truth, and beauty without naively asserting that images conjure these abstractions.

Teeth might have been a barren intellectual exercise.

I don’t like the truths posited in The Future is Unwritten: they’re all banal, off base or painfully disillusioning. 1. Joe Strummer’s friends have many nice things to say about him. 2. Age mellows people. 3. Quiet defeat often passes for wisdom.

Much like the girls it chronicles, seven episodes in, Gossip Girl continues to hold promise, teasingly. The CW television series—closely based upon the young adult novels created by Cecily von Ziegler—was promoted for teenagers but positioned to be a guilty pleasure for an older demographic.

With heroines navigating between their own interests and those of their kin, three prominent offerings betray a cultural anxiety about how to be a responsible adult woman in love.

Nancy Drew has always been better in concept than reality. Young girls read into her all sorts of characteristics she only winks at having: sage wisdom beyond her years, an even temper when harassed, a smart mind and a faultless tongue, and above all, overwhelming freedom and independence.

Everyone’s awesomely unrepressed in The Host, the masterful Korean monster movie by Joon-ho Bong. As soon as the mutant salamander villain slithers out from the river Han (beginning what will be his quick trip to gooey amphibian movie hall of fame), he takes great glee in chasing, swallowing, regurgitating, and licking the residents of Seoul.

Dismissed as a kingdom where no one dies, childhood more often can be prison where no one may grieve, or even feel. An epoch where fears are dismissed as phantoms and needs as whims. It proves near impossible to tell a story wherein the uncontrollable drives and inexpressible pains of youth get treated as real. The narrative must be broad enough to be understood by those children who have only the first inkling of the existence of the questions being addressed; the subtext must be intricate enough to help walk the audience through the answers. The story needs to work itself out in self-similar, increasingly complex, almost fractal-like ways.

Larry Clark’s Wassup Rockers is more finger pointing than his other sympathetic, provocative, and exploitive portrayals of the insulated and often sociopathic worlds of teenagers.

Black Dahlia opens by announcing the logic governing its universe. In the midst of the notorious Zoot Suit riots (conveniently repositioned into the late 1940s), two Anglo Los Angeles police officers beat the shit out of some Mexicans and become allies. They then beat the shit out of each other and become friends.

In The Descent, British director Neil Marshall (who also made the amazing Dog Soldiers) creates a seductive and terrifying universe of Jungian archetypes, traditional horror stereotypes, and bald, disarming, and haunting metaphoric struggles.

For 50 years, Bettie Page has resisted colonization within the American imagination.

Wes Craven, creator and director of 1977’s pioneering The Hills Have Eyes, deemed Alex Andre Aja the future of horror, then handed the director creative control over the current remake.

In 1943, American men were off fighting, and women were off working. These experiences, by definition, changed their points of view. All but the dimmest individuals began to see a disconnect between the rhetoric of equality used to sell the war, and the racial realities of American life.

Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals have the appeal of light reflected from a December snowflake that has fallen precisely half the distance from the streetlamp to the curb. In my mind, that curb is on the north side of the Met with a peripheral view of the Egyptian wing.

It’s been too long since a timeless high school movie came out that doesn’t insult the kids or bore the adults.