All posts by : jjmurphy

Lance Hammer’s first feature Ballast (2008), set in the Mississippi Delta, generated a great deal of critical buzz when it screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and Hammer wound up winning the Best Director award. Like the very bestRead More

Maybe because two of Chris Smith’s earlier films have had the word “American” in their titles – American Job (1996) and American Movie (1999) – there seems to be something incongruous about the fact that his latest film, The PoolRead More

Kelly Reichardt’s first feature River of Grass (1994), a regionally inflected, feminist riff on genre set in the area between Miami and the Everglades, drew critical attention within independent film circles, but received only limited theatrical distribution. It would be over tenRead More

In attempting to explain why a group of high school teenagers in California covered up the murder of a classmate, screenwriter Neal Jimenez and director Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1987) blames the impact of media for the inability of theRead More

In 1966, Danny Williams, one of Andy Warhol’s former lovers and a significant force behind the psychedelic light shows of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, disappeared while visiting his family in New England. Following his early success as an editor forRead More

Neil LaBute’s disturbing black comedy, In the Company of Men (1997), was easily one of the most provocative and controversial films of the 1990s. A romantic office triangle involving two white collar workers and a deaf secretary, the film endedRead More

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) actually causes us to rethink the beginning of the modern independent film movement. The Exiles has been compared by critics to John Cassavetes’ debut feature Shadows (1957-59), but it seems even more related to AlfredRead More

Andy Warhol’s first deliberate effort to make a commercial sexploitation film was I, a Man (1967–68 ), which was supposed to feature both Nico and Jim Morrison, but Morrison backed out at the last minute – possibly because Warhol wantedRead More