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Film Alert: a Witch Most Skillful in Blood-Lusty Sex Magic, James Baldwin Redux, and More


The Love Witch
Thursday December 15, 4:15 pm at Nitehawk: $12

If you can play hooky this afternoon, do. Your first hideout should be Nitehawk’s last screening of The Love Witch, which (witch?) I’m kicking myself for not getting to until now. I blame it all on Anna Biller– the filmmaker has done such a convincing job of making this throwback film look like an actual piece of vintage sexploitation that, for-realsies, even after several once-overs I failed to realize is actually a brand new movie that I should definitely be paying attention to. I mean, even the movie poster (see below) looks exactly like an airbrushed box-office placard advertising some cheap-o, long-forgotten ’70s erotic thriller.

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Week in Film: Los Sures, Surrealist Bloodcore, and Freedom Summer Sings the Blues


Los Sures
Friday December 9, 7 pm to 10 pm at Dobbin Street: $8 to $10 

Dobbin St. is a new “luxury event space” that occasionally throws non-luxury events. For Halloween, they hosted a screening of Suspiria and went all out, washing the space in Dario Argento’s signature evil-pink light and amassing a band to do the live score. They even threw in some popcorn, a bar, and prep school-style beds for good measure.

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Two Takes On ‘Immersive Cinema,’ From the Nightclub to the Museum

Little Cinema

Little Cinema’s The Fifth Element (photo: StudioMadness)

While some would rather #Netflixandchill, there are ways to go out and experience film that stretch above and beyond your typical movie theater or home viewing experience. Some will even “immerse” you in your favorite film, or at least they will try.

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Week in Film: Herzog’s Inferno, Mayan Prophecy Collides with Screen-Zombie Apocalypse


Videofilia (And Other Viral Syndromes)
Friday December 2 through Thursday December 8 at Spectacle, $5

As we’re constantly reminded these days, technological progress is hurdling faster and faster toward the speed of light. These days, we don’t even have to get off our asses and schlep it to the dollar store for toilet paper– we can simply press a button and the butt paper shows up like magic, encased in an obscenely large cardboard box.  Then again, there are times when you’re riding the subway and you’re overwhelmed by an apocalyptic dread, having realized that every single human on board is playing Candy Crush. These things serve to remind us that End Times are nigh, and these phone zombies will be the beginning of a very dark, totally uncool end.

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Week in Film: Pooh-Pooh the ‘Sad Exigencies of Plot,’ and a ‘Mind-Numbing’ Satanic Crime Caper

(Via Light Industry)

(Via Light Industry)

Projective Life 
Tuesday November 22, 7:30 pm at Light Industry: $8 at the door

Light Industry is billing next week’s screening event as a reading (“broadly defined”), which sounds interesting but also begs the question: lol what?

As you may or may not know, Light Industry is more or less a cinema and film discussion forum, but with Projective Life they’re opening up the floor to some good old-fashion poetry and prose, setting the stage for an interesting dialogue between the oral/literary and their usual video and projection modes and getting rid of the “sad exigencies of plot” altogether: “Under these conditions, a film can act as a reading and reading may become a kind of film.”

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Week in Film: a Handmaiden’s S&M Tale and Prison Twelve Ways


The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
Friday November 4, 7 pm and 9:15 pm and through Wednesday November 9 at Anthology Film Archives: $11

This documentary explores the far-reaching consequences of incarceration across the United States, without ever setting foot inside the prison proper. It’s a fascinating take on the impact of the prison system from a different perspective than the one we’re used to, in which the cameras are literally being behind bars. Instead, the subject is approached through absence and invisibility, from the parallel infrastructures that bring food and supplies into penitentiaries to women prisoners fighting forest fires in California.

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Park Slopers Say Goodbye to Pavilion Theater, Now in Nitehawk’s Talons

(Photo: Nicole Disser)

(Photo: Nicole Disser)

As of this morning, the beloved Pavilion is officially no more. Even visiting the Park Slope movie theater’s website early this morning turned up a ghostly message in washed-out grey: “http://www.paviliontheater.com/ has been disabled.”

It’s only appropriate, given that Nitehawk cinemas–the proud new owners of the ratty old Art Deco theater that’s been in decline for several years now– threw a proper New Orleans-style jazz funeral for the place.

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Week in Film: See the Stooges Have a Real Cool Time and Get Shrieked at a Spooky Film Streak


Gimme Danger
Friday October 28 through Thursday November 3 at IFC Center: $14.50

I’m hoping at least a few of you out there, like me, are cursed/blessed by a bizarro Pavlovian response to the words “No Fun”– whenever they’re uttered, even in passing, you immediately drop whatever or whoever you’re doing, wherever you may be, and start thrashing around like a seahorse at the tail end of his week-long soak in a Benzedrine bath.

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Near Future in Film: Lambchop’s Under There and Trumplandia

Yeah, he still doesn't comb his hair (Film still from "Michael Moore Goes to Trumpland")

Yeah, he still doesn’t comb his hair (Film still from “Michael Moore in Trumpland”)

Michael Moore in Trumpland
Monday October 24 through Thursday October 27 at IFC Center: $14

Yeah, yeah we know, Michael Moore is… well, he’s Michael Moore. His particular way of showing outrage feels almost obsolete by now, a bit like a relic of the Bush ere, or worse– like an old white dude who insists on putting himself at the center of his films for some reason that seems to have disintegrated long ago. For his latest film, you might expect that Moore has aimed his camera squarely at “Trumpland” aka underemployed, undereducated white men in flyover America. But that’s not the case at all, actually.

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Week in Film: Slippery Suffocaters and a Skin-tastic Japanese Pink Film Redux

(Flyer via Spectacle)

(Flyer via Spectacle)

Daydream
Saturday October 14,  midnight at Spectacle: $5

Throughout the month of October, Spectacle is running a series on Pink Film, a Japanese cinematic movement that began in the groovy ’60s– a time when counterculture thrived in Japan and, just like the U.S. and France and other countries across the world, ideas about free love and experimental art-making began to take hold.

According to the theater, this is “the largest and most comprehensive [retrospective] of its kind in North America” and covers Pink’s evolution from start to present. Sick.

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