Aaron Hillis

BRAN NUE DAE Dorky and earnest, aboriginal teen Willie (Rocky McKenzie) proves deep down a dissident when he escapes Catholic boarding school in 1969 Perth, extinguishing the fire and brimstone of Father Benedictus (a hammy, German-inflected Geoffrey Rush) through cheeky song: "There's nothing I would rather be/Than to be an......

With the Internet's stranglehold on the pop culture zeitgeist, it's incredible that a good old-fashioned, cheesy film can still become a cult classic. But no matter how many fucked-up viral videos we've collectively seen or how desensitized we've become to high weirdness, writer-director James Nguyen's self-proclaimed romantic thriller Birdemic: Shock and......

Out from under the $25 million debt incurred from self-financing Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart, and so no longer seduced by Hollywood moolah, 70-year-old wine mogul — and, oh, yeah, legendary filmmaker — Francis Ford Coppola returns to his early indie roots with the self-released, black-and-white and breathtaking......

“Stop using the term ‘New Wave’ once and for all! Evaluate each film on its own merits!” protested a critic-turned-auteur from Kyoto named Nagisa Oshima in an angry 1960 denunciation of both Shochiku — the studio that funded his daring anti-Stalinist milestone, Night and Fog in Japan, before pulling it......

Director Guy Maddin’s latest pomo revitalization of early-cinema tropes and aesthetics sees the Winnipeg-based fabulist attempting a blockbuster event: a live spectacle with celeb narrators and an 11-piece orchestra, at least for the first three days of the film’s Los Angeles premiere engagement, after which it’s a prerecorded score and......