Admirably living up to its illustrious pedigree, Looney Tunes: Back in Action is like a pop culture-gorged Hope-and-Crosby buddy flick hopped up on mescaline. Working in the same rapid-fire vein as Gremlins 2: The New Batch, director Joe Dante (with a script by Larry Doyle) crams his delirious film so full of cinematic allusions, fourth…

Andrew Bujalski’s no-budget indie Funny Ha Ha is many things, but humorous – in the playful, jovial vein implied by its title – it is not. A sympathetic portrait of recent college grad Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) as she uneventfully wanders to and fro in search of a job, a beer and love, the film affects…

His straightforward, austere direction corresponding with his subjects’ difficult interaction with the world, Werner Herzog masterfully conveys the logistical, emotional, and psychological burden suffered by the hearing and sight-impaired in Land of Silence and Darkness. Fini Straubinger, a woman who lost both sight and hearing during a severe staircase fall at the age of nine,…

Were I feeling more generous, I might try to make the case that Larry Cohen’s Wicked Stepmother is really an allegory about societal mistreatment of the elderly – how, shirking their familial obligations, many use television as an old fogy babysitter, shuttle off their parents and grandparents to live alone, and generally ignore seniors’ needs…

The Stuff is arguably writer/director Larry Cohen’s most disappointing work, not because it’s terrible but, rather, because its execution never lives up to its scrumptious satiric premise. Corporate saboteur Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty, in another entertainingly odd, mumble-mouthed performance) is hired by ice cream industry interests to discover the secret behind desert sensation The Stuff,…

With Vertigo and Peeping Tom as his most obvious (but far from only) touchstones, Larry Cohen dives headfirst into meta territory with Special Effects, a self-reflexive thriller that deliriously dissects the boundaries between reality and fiction. With his career in shambles after having blown a $30 million special effects-laden project, director Christopher Neville (Eric Bogosian,…

Wholly unrelated to the adventures of Balki Bartokomous and Cousin Larry, Larry Cohen’s Perfect Strangers delivers off-kilter thrills via the story of a mob hit man named Johnny (Brad Rijn) who enters into a relationship with single mom Sally (Anne Carlisle) after her two-year-old son Matthew (Matthew Stockley) witnesses one of his contract killings. Johnny…