Phil Coldiron

Carlen Altman and Alex Ross Perry

AFI Film Festival 2011: The Color Wheel and Green

Phil Coldiron
The cream not just of AFI's Young Americans section but of the entire festival, The Color Wheel finds Alex Ross Perry moving from stoned tinkering with Gravity's Rainbow and the history of the war film in his first feature, Impolex, to a scattershot tumble through classical drama by way of......
The Good Old Naughty Days

Sex, Soviets and Hitchcock: Your Weekly Movie To-do List

Phil Coldiron
Thurs., May 26 Robin Hessman's My Perestroika returns for a single showing at the Echo Park Film Center (8 p.m.); reviewing the film on its theatrical release, Weekly critic Nick Pinkerton praised Hessman's doc, which follows five former USSR-era classmates through their post-Soviet lives, as "compelling oral history." There's hardly......
Nina Menkes' Phantom Love

Nina Menkes' Dissolution and Phantom Love

Phil Coldiron
In the 25 years since her first feature, Magdalena Viraga, Nina Menkes has remained one of the few American directors working at feature length whose films — in both form and thought — are genuinely radical. Menkes' main preoccupation across her six films (including Phantom Love and her latest work,......

Boonmee Bounces Back: Your Weekly To-Do List

Phil Coldiron
Friday Takashi Miike's bloody, brilliant samurai saga 13 Assassins makes its way back to the Westside for a run at the Santa Monica 4-Plex. Sunday Another can't-miss event at Echo Park Film Center: The latest installment in its essential Film Journeys series features Argentine director Celina Murga's A Week Alone......

The Bleeding House

Phil Coldiron
The Bleeding House, arriving this week at the Sunset 5 under the aegis of Tribeca Films, concerns the Smiths, a Texas family harboring a deep secret that has rendered the cushy isolation of their wooded suburbia vaguely sinister. Their already precarious position crumbles upon the arrival of a serial killer......

Neds

Phil Coldiron
Like many of the glumly realist crowd-pleasers funded by the U.K. Film Council before it, Peter Mullan’s NEDS — that’s “non-educated delinquents” — tells the story of a youth trapped in the hellish depths of lower-class life. John McGill, the young man at the center of the story, is ably......
Meek's Cutoff

Movies This Weekend: Meek's and a Classic Priest

Phil Coldiron
April doesn't always bring the strongest theatrical openings, but this week is a real embarrassment of riches. We cover them all for you below: J. Hoberman reviews Meek's Cutoff, the latest from indie luminary Kelly Reichardt, and notes that while "Meek's Cutoff has a tranced-out quality...the political implications, regarding trust......