MY FAVORITE OKLAHOMAN Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne indulges his inner E.T.
Sept. 9, 2008
Joining the cult-filmmaking ranks of Frank Zappa and Neil Young, the visionary Oklahoma rockers the Flaming Lips — specifically lead singer Wayne Coyne — have finally unwrapped their long-rumored “Christmas on Mars: A Fantastical Film Freakout Featuring the Flaming Lips.” Seven years in the making, the 85-minute science-fiction head trip makes its New York premiere Friday in a new, and appropriately unconventional, movie space.
Cinema Purgatorio, the Manhattan-based outfit devoted to promoting the indie-est of independent films, has …

Originally published in the New York Sun in advance of the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s Frank mini-retrospective to honor the 50th anniversary of The Americans. Reprised here as a reminder of the full-blown Frank retrospective continuing through Nov. 16 at the Anthology Film Archives.
Fifty years ago today, “The Americans” was published in Paris. Robert Frank’s book of 83 black-and-white images, extracted from more than 28,000 individual shots taken on road trips between 1955 and 1957, did not reflect the apple-pie vistas of Eisenhower suburbia. The Swiss photographer had a …

So much ado about the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 in New York cinema culture this year, and yet very little looks as prescient as this trilogy of satirical films, cult items all, shot by onetime Vogue photographer William Klein in the decade between LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War and the arrival of the Sex Pistols.
The latest installment in Criterion’s no-fuss Eclipse series of boxed-set obscurities, “The Delirious Fictions of William Klein” more than lives up to its title: these Pop Art escapades erupt with laughing-gas absurdity. Mr. Klein, now …

When previews of American Teen were screened on large overhead monitors in a giant sports bar during a party at this year’s South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, the smartly edited montage of life in a Midwestern high school looked like a teaser for a new cable network series. One of the documentary’s selling points is its professional slickness, achieved on a remarkably slight $5 million budget, which adroitly packages a year’s worth of fly-on-the-laptop peeking into adolescent drama as if such raw, emotional, self-lacerating stuff was a …