As I strolled over to IFC Film Center earlier this month to watch a screening of dystopian thriller Bacurau, I wondered if anyone would even be there. Or would the theater be as sparsely populated as the Brazilian desert village where the John-Carpenter-esque nouveau western is set? More →

Bernie Sanders may or may not end up getting us free health care, but he did bring a free Strokes concert to Dunham, New Hampshire on Monday. And that counts for something, considering how much it cost to see them at Barclays Center on New Year’s Eve. At the Brooklyn show, they played some new songs and announced their first album since 2013; this time around, they kicked things off with a Bernie-appropriate cover of “Burning Down the House” and revealed that the album, The New Abnormal, will be out April 10. More →

Ever since Parasite made its local premiere at the New York Film Festival in October, everyone’s been talking about the Bong Joon-ho thriller about a working-class Korean family that insinuates itself into the life of a much wealthier family, to– let’s just say– memorable effect. If you haven’t seen it because movies are just so expensive these days, and if, somehow, no one has spoiled it for you at this point, you may want to get over to Industry City on Friday for a boozy free screening. Score one for the proletariat! More →

In what might be the most delightful intra-indie homage since Sleater-Kinney sang “I wanna be your Thurston Moore,” the new single from The Get Up Kids, titled “Lou Barlow,” starts out: “I saw Lou Barlow on the street / I don’t think he noticed me.” Now, in a real stroke of genius, the Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh singer-guitarist stars in the song’s music video, out today.

The marvelously meta video, filmed this past summer, shows Barlow, in all of his hirsute glory, catching wind of a Get Up Kids concert at Bowery Ballroom and trying to blag his way in by showing the bouncer that the band named a song after him. He even flashes what looks like his actual Massachusetts drivers license. When he’s refused, he has one of his patented Barlow breakdowns. We’ve seen these tantrums on stage before, so this isn’t exactly method acting. But Barlow insists, in a press release, that he “acted the shit out of that.” MTV Video Music Awards, take note.

“We kept joking how hilarious it would be if we could get Lou Barlow to be in the video for ‘Lou Barlow,’” Get Up Kids frontman Matt Pryor is quoted as saying. “It was absolute luck that we both happened to be in New York on the same day. When he agreed, we were thrilled. When we saw how much he put into the video, we were floored. He was amazing.”

The song is about a couple nearing the end of their relationship– and while it’s unlikely to replace Sebadoh’s “Soul and Fire” in the classic breakup song category, you have to agree with Get Up Kids that it’s a bad sign when your partner refuses to hum along to Lou Barlow.  

“Enough!” Lydia Lunch told the crowd at IFC Center as they gave her a semi-standing ovation after the world premiere of Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over.

“If you don’t think I know how fucking great I am, you don’t know anything,” growled the former frontwoman of influential No Wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. More →

When it comes to famously unmade movies, there’s Jodorowsky’s Dune and Terry Gilliam’s Don.

Gilliam’s decades-long quest to adapt Don Quixote was the stuff of cinema legend until 2018, when he finally premiered The Man Who Killed Don Quixote after some three decades of snafus. Some of those snafus– or what Gilliam would probably call fuckups– were captured in Lost in La Mancha, and now the directors of that 2002 film, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, are following it up with another behind-the-scenes doc. He Dreams of Giants premiered at DocNYC last night and screens again tonight, and surely rivals 63 Up— the latest film in the 7 Up series– as the festival’s most powerful serial portrait of aging. More →