A film critic and writer for the better part of a decade, Stacia also plays classical guitar, reads murder mysteries and shamelessly abuses both caffeine and her Netflix queue.
A fantastic achievement in both entertainment and form, William Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928) received only a tepid response on its original release. Based on Jim Tully’s second (of over 40) books about his years riding the rails, Beggars portrays hobos as all-American representatives of freedom. Not that it’s changed…
RoboCop, a dark political and cultural satire and director Paul Verhoeven’s first American film, was released in the middle of a summer no one knew was a harbinger of things to come. Filled with arid, empty urban landscapes covered in dust and rust and decay, the disintegrating Detroit of the film, thirty years on, less…
Letters from Baghdad documents the life of the extraordinary Gertrude Bell, an accomplished mountaineer, archaeologist, intelligence officer, and maybe even spy. Directed with obvious affection by Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum, Tilda Swinton as the voice of Bell reads excerpts from her letters and diaries, accompanied…
“In death I will be stronger than you in life!” announces Kimo (Gregg Palmer), moments before his unjust execution by Pacific Island chieftain Tano (Robert Swan). True to his word, Kimo returns from…
Famously billed as “The Motion Picture With Something to Offend Everyone,” Tony Richardson’s The Loved One has developed a devoted cult following over the decades. Yet, like all good cult films, even modern critics decry the film’s ghastly lack of taste. Based on Evelyn Waugh’s 1948 satire of American culture…
Relying heavily on interviews with the late Jack Tramiel, 8-Bit Generation: The Commodore Wars means to trace the history of the Commodore 64, arguably the most popular and influential early home computer. Long since outclassed by computers vastly more powerful, the Commodore 64 dominated the 1980s, primarily due…
Harold and Lillian Michelson are the Hollywood power couple you’ve never heard of. Married for 60 years, the couple worked on dozens of major films from the 1950s through the 2000s. Lillian worked at and later owned a large research library, and Harold, a WWII vet who used the G.I. Bill to get an art degree, worked his way up from…
Bert Berns, a major figure in the early 1960s American pop and R&B recording scene, was certainly unsung, but it would be a stretch to call him a hero. A musical childhood lead to a fascination with Latin and Cuban music, which in turn lead him to co-write the classic “Twist and Shout,” sung first by The Top Notes and produced by a…
In 2015, the news cycle, at least for one day, exploded with the revelation that the earth at this moment is in its sixth major extinction event, known as the Holocene. For most people, this was apparently a shrug-and-forget-it bit of news, but for director Mélanie Laurent and activist Cyril Dion, it was something more: a call to action…
Arturo knows exactly when he was conceived: December 10, 1969, the day of the Viale Lazio massacre, which took place just down the street from his parents’ home in Palermo. The mafia affects everyone’s life, declares Arturo, and he maintains that the only reason he was born at all is because most of his father’s sperm was scared…