John Lurie—saxophonist, singer, actor, director, and painter—is a true jack-of-all trades, best known for founding and leading the Lounge Lizards jazz ensemble, his performances in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law (as well as his work on HBO’s Oz), and his sterling IFC/Bravo TV series Fishing with John, in which he took various famous friends (Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe, and […]
Nick Schager
49 posts
Considering how many involve law enforcement corruption, true crime stories suggest that without accountability cops can’t be trusted to behave properly in obtaining confessions, charging individuals, or admitting to their mistakes regarding unjust convictions. The Night Caller is both a sprawling serial-killer mystery and a saga about legal exoneration. Yet by its conclusion, it primarily proves to be another infuriating non-fiction portrait of police malfeasance and—worse […]
Even with the best detectives on the job, catching a serial killer often hinges on a lucky break—a fact proven by the case of Richard Ramirez, the young man known as the Night Stalker who spent most of 1985 terrifying Los Angeles. Over the better part of a year, Ramirez committed a stunning number of brutal crimes, and compounding matters, he did so in a pattern-less […]
Nicolas Cage can make anything cool, and that certainly applies to cursing, as confirmed by Netflix’s History of Swear Words (debuting Jan. 5), in which the Oscar-winning superstar plays host to an inquiry into our most beloved profane utterances. Cage’s participation is the highlight of executive producers Brien Meagher and Rhett Bachner’s comedic look at taboo English-language terms, lending it just the right amount of educational […]
Many supernatural shows partake in the crazy, but few do so with the non-stop gusto of 30 Coins, whose maiden season is awash in unhinged religious insanity. The brainchild of director Álex de la Iglesia (The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus), who helms its entire eight-episode run, this Spanish saga dials itself to eleven from the outset, and then somehow manages to maintain its […]
Pete Docter is responsible for two of Pixar’s undisputed masterpieces—Monsters, Inc. and Inside Out (along with the first five minutes of Up)—so it’s reasonable to expect lofty things from the animation director, who now doubles as the studio’s chief creative officer. The acclaimed filmmaker certainly doesn’t lack for grand ambition with his latest, Soul, a saga that plumbs existence’s big mysteries by venturing into spiritual realms […]
No serial killer is more famous than Jack the Ripper, so when prostitutes began turning up dead in West Yorkshire, England, beginning in 1975—their bodies horrifically bludgeoned, mutilated, and then posed so they might be spotted by passersby—the fiend responsible for these atrocities was immediately likened to the famed Victorian slayer via the moniker “The Yorkshire Ripper.” The similarities between the two cases were striking, and […]
Stephen King never wrote a novel more epic—in literal or figurative terms—than 1978’s The Stand, and the continuing power of its story about the battle for humanity’s soul in a pandemic-ravaged United States has only been enhanced, unfortunately, by our own ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Arriving at an all-too-relevant moment, CBS All Access’ adaptation of King’s magnum opus (premiering Dec. 17) is anything but escapism; scenes of […]
Guatemala’s civil war between the right-wing military government and leftist rebels raged for 36 years, taking the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians. When it was nearing its completion, the Human Rights Office of the Catholic Church (ODHA) started investigating atrocities committed during the brutal campaign, most of which, it determined, were perpetrated by the army. The ODHA’s work culminated with 1998’s Recovery of Historical Memory project […]
In Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston embodied a seemingly honorable man who saw a criminal opportunity, took it, and then took to it. Your Honor, on the other hand, features the actor as an honorable man who’s forced by circumstance to behave in a criminal manner, and discovers that he’s quite good at it—albeit not necessarily good enough to evade capture. For Cranston, it’s a chance to […]
Steven Soderbergh remains American cinema’s most exciting pioneer. From his groundbreaking indie debut sex, lies, and videotape, to his Oscar-winning Traffic and Erin Brockovich, to his blockbuster Ocean’s 11 trilogy, to his more unconventional efforts like Kafka, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience and Unsane—not to mention his forays into TV with Cinemax’s stellar The Knick, and his inventive branching-narrative project Mosaic—the 57-year-old auteur never rests on his […]
Many action movies are flippantly likened to video games, but few have ever earned that comparison more than Jiu Jitsu. A series of Street Fighter-esque showdowns tethered together by the type of plot that would barely pass muster in a ‘90s coin-op, Dimitri Logothetis’ film tries to overtly embrace its print-based roots—it’s an adaptation of a comic series penned by the writer/director, and features transitional interludes […]
A former entertainment personality decides, in his later years, to go into politics. To curry favor with the Republican Party whose nomination he seeks, he cozies up to red-state extremists and evangelicals via a healthy dose of racist dog whistles. He couples that with decrying communists, liberalism, and anyone out in the streets protesting for social justice. To top it off, he then aligns himself with […]
On March 3, 2010, Barbara Hamburg was found murdered outside her home at 44 Middle Beach Road in the quiet, affluent seaside town of Madison, Connecticut. It was a slaying that shocked the region and shattered the Hamburg family, and the ensuing investigation’s failure to come up with a single potential culprit worth charging only compounded the air of mystery surrounding the crime. In an attempt […]
When The Mandalorian premiered last November on Disney+, it instantly rejuvenated the Star Wars franchise, which at that point was contending with continuing criticism of the reinvention-oriented The Last Jedi, and on the precipice of inciting significant fan backlash over the underwhelming The Rise of Skywalker. A modestly-scaled affair that substituted operatic save-the-world spectacle for lean samurai-Western action—think an intergalactic version of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or […]
Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are obsessed with time. In each of the writing/directing duo’s features—2012’s Resolution, 2015’s Spring, and 2018’s The Endless—the ability to travel backwards or forwards in history, or to exist eternally, affords insights into the nature of self, and the knotty emotional and psychological dynamics that govern our lives. Cleverly idiosyncratic, they’re genre filmmakers who use their twisty temporal sci-fi conceits for […]
Arguably the most difficult facet of prosecuting a serial killer case concerns the issue of insanity, since anyone who commits unspeakable atrocities must, in some respect, be out of his or her mind—and thus potentially innocent of premeditation, or able to know right from wrong. That question was essential in the trial of Dennis Nilsen, a Scottish-born resident of London who, in early 1983, was arrested […]
“Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” proclaimed Dave Chappelle’s Rick James, and the same is true of gambling. For proof, just ask Craig Carton, whose world collapsed in 2017 thanks to an addiction to blackjack and the ensuing fraud he perpetrated to pay off his debts. A counselor featured in Wild Card: The Downfall of a Radio Loudmouth equates playing cards for money with snorting […]
Abraham Lincoln was photographed 130 times during the course of his life. But a new Discovery Channel special asks, what if there’s an additional snapshot of the 16th commander-in-chief—on his deathbed? Even setting aside the debatable importance of such a photograph—which wouldn’t prove anything, or provide insights into his final moments—the likelihood that this image could have remained unknown and hidden for 155 years seems very […]
Heir to cinema’s body-horror throne, writer/director Brandon Cronenberg triumphantly follows in dad David’s footsteps with Possessor, a grandly gruesome sci-fi nightmare that traces the blurry line between the psychological and the corporeal, the real and the imagined, and the authentic and the affected. Coming on the heels of his prior 2012 Antiviral, it heralds Cronenberg as a formidable talent in his own right, marking him as […]
Few voices in the metal community are more recognizable—or ferocious—than the one wielded by Corey Taylor, who as frontman for horror-metal juggernaut Slipknot has rightly earned the nickname The Great Big Mouth, and whose work with Stone Sour has allowed him to naturally expand into the hard-rock mainstream. Taylor’s output covers a vast stylistic and emotional range, from rage and misery to heartbreak and longing, and […]
Errol Morris is one of non-fiction cinema’s all-time greats, a godfather of modern true crime thanks to 1988’s The Thin Blue Line, which famously got Randall Dale Adams off of death row. So when he says that another murderer is innocent of the crimes for which he’s been convicted, it’s necessary to listen—if not to instinctively believe him. And yet A Wilderness of Error, FX’s five-part […]
As Sofia Coppola has gotten older, so too have her protagonists, which makes it easy to see them—and their plights—as reflections of the aspirations and anxieties currently preoccupying the auteur. That’s once again true with On the Rocks, the story of a 39-year-old writer struggling with insecurity, suspicions about her husband, and the long shadow cast by her larger-than-life father, here played by Coppola’s Lost in […]
We’re so inundated with evidence of Donald Trump’s fascistic villainy—these days, largely related to the pandemic he’s neglected and mismanaged to the tune of 200,000 dead Americans and counting—that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s also a traitorous puppet who won the 2016 election with Russian assistance. Enter Agents of Chaos, a two-part HBO documentary from the insanely prolific Alex Gibney (debuting Sept. 23) which […]
In the history of love stories, few have been as strange and unlikely as the one depicted in My Octopus Teacher. Netflix’s first original South African feature documentary concerns the wholly unexpected, and ostensibly transformative, affair struck between Craig Foster, a South African filmmaker, and an amphibious mollusk that he discovered in the Atlantic Ocean near the small seaside bungalow he frequented as a kid. It’s […]
We’ll likely never know exactly how Osama bin Laden personally reconciled his many jarring contradictions, but we can be reasonably certain he would have loathed Bin Laden’s Hard Drive, National Geographic’s deep dive into the cache of digital and written materials that were confiscated by the Navy SEAL team that stormed his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, and ended his life on the […]
Robin Williams’ self-inflicted death on Aug. 11, 2014, at the age of 63 shocked the world, not only because few knew that the acclaimed actor had been suffering in any way, but because despite his history of substance-abuse problems, his effusive, uninhibited, hyperactive spirit was so joyous and infectious that it simply didn’t gibe with suicide. With no concrete explanation for why he’d taken his own […]
On a nondescript April night in 1990, 21-year-old Dale Wayne Sigler walked into a Brazoria County, Texas, Subway shop and robbed it of $400. When the man behind the counter, John William Zeltner Jr., attempted to flee into the back room, he was shot six times. The “overkill” nature of the crime implied that the two weren’t mere strangers, and the ensuing revelation that Sigler knew […]
On more than one sunny day during my childhood, my friends and I took a drive down to Vernon, New Jersey’s Action Park, which was advertised incessantly on tri-state area TV as a venue of non-stop good times courtesy of “75 of the wildest, wettest family rides in the world.” While its commercials promised family fun, however, Action Park really delivered a traumatizing sort of excitement, […]
A highly contagious virus spreading rapidly through a crowded indoor space populated by individuals who sometimes put their own interests ahead of those of their fellow man, and a quarantine zone-enforcing government that offers false assurances that everything’s okay and everyone is safe—2016’s Train to Busan is a modern zombie classic that becomes more horrifyingly timely by the minute. Thus, it’s an ideally disquieting moment for […]
The aliens aren’t coming—they may already be here! Or, at least, that’s what recent news suggests the U.S. government suspects. Just this past week, the Pentagon announced it was creating a new task force to look into the existence of UFOs that may have been witnessed flying around and over U.S. military bases. That development was spurred by a New York Times report that, despite previous […]
The only thing more dangerous than monsters in Lovecraft Country are racists—although there are plenty of both in HBO’s new series, and sometimes they’re one and the same. Blending comedy and drama, horror and sci-fi, social commentary and genre thrills, showrunner/writer Misha Green’s adaptation of Matt Ruff’s 2016 novel tackles American intolerance through the prism of author H.P. Lovecraft, whose famed work about ancient, incomprehensible evils […]
Though I might like to claim otherwise, I’m no expert on big-screen T&A&D. Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies, however, makes a bid for being the definitive documentary on the subject. Driven by a cornucopia of film clip and talking heads—led by actors, directors, historians and critics—it delivers a thorough chronological timeline of cinematic nakedness. Too bad, then, that when it comes to actually […]