At first glance, the premise of cartoonist and author Ted Rall’s autobiographical graphic novel The Year of Loving Dangerously reads like pure porno fantasy. After being kicked out of Columbia University, dumped by his girlfriend and fired from his job all in a matter of weeks, a broke and homeless Rall found a creative way to ensure a roof over his head throughout the summer of 1984: bedding a bevy of Manhattan women. Actually making it work proved a complicated mixture of carnal delights and desperation. more

They knew the question before I was finished asking it. I was talking with filmmakers Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell at the launch party for their documentary Until the Light Takes Us at The Knitting Factory. I was starting to inquire as to why a party celebrating a film about black metal bands wouldn’t include some, you know, black metal bands. Both began to smile, and Ewell laid it out for me in disarmingly simple terms. more

WHEN JOE MAUCERI was young, his grandmother took him to a double feature.The first movie was a Yogi Bear cartoon, during which Mauceri quickly fell asleep. The adults decided to let him snooze and take in the second feature: Robert Aldrich’s creep-tastic Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in which Bette Davis plays an aging recluse living in the same house where her married lover (Bruce Dern) was mutilated decades earlier.When Mauceri finally opened his eyes, he was confronted with a rather startling image. more

The Hand of Fatima fits squarely into the ever-expanding genre of films documenting a director’s journey into his or her familial past. The public recording of what, in theory, is an intensely private experience, these filmmakers must create enough emotional legibility for the outside viewer to connect with their subjective state, while maintaining that intensely personal quality that brings their film the sheen of authenticity. more

At a moment when DVD sales continue to decline and new releases can often be downloaded (legally or otherwise) days after their theatrical release, Matt Grady has taken a bit of a gamble. The 39-year-old founder of Factory 25, a new independent film and music label based out of Brooklyn, is betting that you’ll still shell out some money for a DVD—or even a vinyl record—so long as what you’re getting is more than just a disc in a plastic case. more

The fact that Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur—a searing and unsentimental account of the author’s messy emotional and mental breakdown following the success of On the Road—has inspired so bald-faced a piece of hagiography as Curt Worden’s One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is a choice irony. There’s nothing inherently bad about the documentary about the real-life events that eventually culminated in the classic; it’s just that there’s little revelatory in it either. If you go in thinking that Jack Kerouac was a troubled guy but one hell of a writer, that’s about all you’ll take out as well. more

Adventures of Power has all the elements of those sneering indie quirkfests that feign sympathy for its outsider characters but really just wants to document their loserdom with smug detachment. Gangly, eccentrically-dressed hero? Check. Weirdly fetishized lower-middle-class milieu? Yep. Stern but caring blue-collar parent? You betcha. And to top it off, it’s a movie about air-drum players! Strike up the 1980s-era synthesizers, sit back and let the deluded antics begin! more

A low-key and somewhat dour remake of the late Theo Van Gogh’s 1996 film, Blind Date is the kind of movie that some will dismiss as “stagy.” The dialogue-driven character study is set entirely within the confines of a dimly-lit restaurant, and one can easily imagine the series of encounters between troubled spouses Don (Stanley Tucci) and Janna (Patricia Clarkson) taking place in some hole-in-the-wall black box in the West Village. more