The Creative Partnership Behind Team Rayceen Productions
The story of Team Rayceen Productions, a local advocacy and events organization that was honored earlier this year when the city declared March 18 Team Rayceen Day, begins with a couch. The year was 2014, and the couch was in the since-shuttered Liv Nightclub, where queer activist and noted socialite Rayceen Pendarvis was setting up…
Retro Review: Brian De Palma’s Blow Out Watches You Watch
Blow Out is here to trick you. It pretends it has something deep and profound to say about America. Set on the weekend of the fictional Liberty Day Parade in Philadelphia, Blow Out revolves around a political assassination and cover-up, and concludes with a murder committed under fireworks and in front of an enormous American…
Julianne Nicholson Gives a Towering Performance in the Quietly Powerful Janet Planet
It is only natural that Annie Baker would eventually write and direct a feature film. The accomplished playwright, whose work has been performed in D.C. theaters including Studio and Signature, has always had an interest in the movies. You may recall The Flick, the play that earned Baker a Pulitzer, is set in a movie…
The Bikeriders: From Books to the Two-Lane Blacktop
Credit writer-director Jeff Nichols, a half-dozen features into his career, with staying out of the Franchise Wars. At least two films on his resume, the sublime 2011 eco-psychological thriller Take Shelter and 2016’s Midnight Special, fall squarely within the sci-fi/paranormal adventure space. In the years since, he was attached to follow-ups to A Quiet Place…
DC/DOX Film Festival Comes Into Its Own This Weekend
Now in its second year, the DC/DOX film festival is coming into its own. Thoughtfully programmed and with a breadth of cinematic sensibilities, it feels distinct from SilverDocs and AFI Docs, the previous documentary festivals that would take place in the D.C. area in June. Spearheaded by festival director and programmer Sky Sitney, DC/DOX starts…
Anxiety Takes Control—and Fumbles It—in Inside Out 2
Inside Out 2 continues 2015’s tale of anthropomorphized emotions, and complicates them with puberty. When we last left Riley, she was an 11-year-old girl who moved from Minnesota to San Francisco. The original film’s co-director and co-screenwriter Pete Docter imagined five core emotions governing Riley’s mind, almost like officers on the bridge of the Enterprise…
Fourth Down: The Slap-Happy Bad Boys: Ride or Die Is a Family Affair
Danny Glover was only 40 when cameras rolled on Lethal Weapon, the platonic ideal of bickering buddy-cop flicks, in which he played a straight-arrow, family-man detective facing dual crucibles: his 50th birthday (the makeup department grayed his hair) and being partnered with a reckless, possibly suicidal, younger cop. Will Smith, 55, and Martin Lawrence, 59,…
Bleak, Bloody, and Beautiful: Once Upon a Time in the West Defines Cinema
Sergio Leone had already made an indelible contribution to the western genre by the time he got around to co-writing and directing 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Earlier in the decade, he’d introduced the world to Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, and made two superior sequels, For a Few Dollars…
Women Take the Lead in This Year’s Spanish Cinema Now Festival
You’ll find more than a few throughlines among the 10 films being screened at the 2024 edition of Spanish Cinema Now, the annual festival that showcases the best in Spanish films. Revenge is a recurring theme, especially in dark comedy Something Is About to Happen and in Hugo Ruíz’s nightmarish character study One Night With…
The Best Thing About Tony Goldwyn’s Ezra Is That It Ends
The flaws in Ezra are obvious despite its quest to not sound like a typical dramedy. The characters are foulmouthed, and yet they resort to familiar platitudes at the exact moments you would expect. Director Tony Goldwyn and screenwriter Tony Spiridakis set up a scene and do not always go for the obvious payoff, and…
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