When David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows premiered in 2014, I was in awe of how simultaneously timeless and timely the film was. There was a marked jump in collective screen time after 2013, the start of many more people having access to everything (the internet, each other) all the time (smartphones) — the start of time collapsing in on itself just as it does in the film...

Lisa John Rogers

March 11, 2024

As I sit down to make sense of True Romance and how it works its way through how I understand myself in relation to the city I’m transported in time to my uncle’s white van on I-94 in the pitch blackness of the early evening, working our way back to “Midtown”/”Cass Corridor” from an off the books scrap job in the suburbs...

Walter Lucken IV

December 22, 2023

Scrolling Time Magazine’s list of “The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades,” one would not think to find auteur Jim Jarmusch’s night-dwelling vampire romance Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) amongst the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Greta Gerwig, set to represent the 2010s...

Darian Hillaker

December 11, 2023

August 2 was a hot night in Detroit and on E. Boston Boulevard, a bunch of people moshed at a mansion owned by a young musician named Brian McGuire. The Armed were in town to shoot a music video before setting out on tour...

Maddie Boyer and Ashley Cook

August 9, 2023

When Lizzie Borden made Working Girls, she wasn’t intending to directly comment on her own experience. Instead, like any filmmaker with true heart, she was telling a story she felt needed to be told. I’m a huge fan of everything she’s done before and since, but as I told Lizzie (as you are about to read), Working Girls is the standout...

Oliver Shaw

July 31, 2023

Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street is the ultimate example of a hidden gem. After a long overdue national tour last year (including a screening and Q&A with writer/director/star Wendell B. Harris at the city’s own Cinema Detroit), the film is finally reaching an audience Hollywood hoped it would never find...

Oliver Shaw

March 27, 2023