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Search Results for: david lynch

Beat Tales From Flying Lotus And David Lynch: “Fire Is Coming”

May 24, 2019 By CvH Leave a Comment

From Flamagra

Released today on Warp Records
Film directed by Steven Ellison & David Firth

https://www.riotmaterial.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/13-Fire-Is-Coming-feat.-David-Lynch.m4a

Flying Lotus, “Fire is Coming” (feat. David Lynch)
[full track]

Filed Under: Riot Sounds, Video

The Horror Of Our Seed: Revisiting David Lynch’s The Grandmother

October 31, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

If there is ever a core idea behind our modern-day celebration of Halloween it is the need to escape. We run from ourselves into masks and costumes, for one night becoming that which we wish we had been. Sometimes we choose the face of a monster, only because we as mere humans are the most monstrous creations of all. Fear of oneself is essentially fear of your seed, of your origins. No filmmaker has captured the very psychology of America like David Lynch, and even in his early student and short film work, one finds an artist digging into the depths of his psychic plane, and our own. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

David Lynch: I Was A Teenage Insect

September 28, 2018 By Emily Nimptsch Leave a Comment

at Kayne Griffin Corcoran (Through November 10, 2018)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Disturbing yet mesmerizing depictions of death, decay, and deformity bestrew beloved neo-noir director David Lynch’s latest collection of multimedia paintings, watercolors, and drawings currently on display at Kayne Griffin Corcoran. This series of dark, violent, and surreal meditations on childhood and adolescence offers a rare and tantalizing peek into the celebrated film legend’s perplexing psyche. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

David Lynch’s Room To Dream, A Bio-Memoir

September 6, 2018 By John Biscello Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Biscello

Room to Dream
by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Random House, 592 pp., $32.00

All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream. 
                   — Edgar Allan Poe

David Lynch, Room To DreamFor the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

Cooking Quinoa With David Lynch

September 4, 2017 By Riot Material 1 Comment

Kitchen Talk. A Long Smoke. A Story (of course!).

“It was dark. I mean, a moonless night, barren landscape. And suddenly the train slows, and stops. And somehow the message went out that we could disembark, go off the train, because there was an opportunity to buy some drinks. But there was no station. You come off the metal stairs on the train, and go across, dust, dust was blowing, dust was filling the air, and it was somehow warmly lilt from the interior lights on the train that was spilling out from this barren, dust-filled landscape. And there, through the dust, we saw this little stand, canvas and wood, with some small lamps around it. And as we got closer we saw bottles: yellow bottles, green bottles. The bottles were clear, but the fluid inside was green or yellow or red or violet. And it was sugar water. It wasn’t, you know, chilled. It was just absolutely the temperature of the outdoors. And for the smallest amount of money you could get a bottle of this sugar water. So I gave the man there in this small tent — moths were flipping and flying like frogs, frog moths were pulling themselves out of the earth and flying up in front of the stand, dust was blowing, it was like a mysterious strange-wind sound, and out came the tiniest little copper coin that I got somewhere, and I gave it to this man. I gave the man the coin. He gave me a bottle of, I don’t know if I got violet sugar water or what. I got this bottle. And, in addition, I got a paper, a piece of paper money — four inches by three inches — the most beautiful, intricately designed gold and green and blue, red, a piece of paper money, and the bottle, for just giving him this small copper coin. Back I went into the train . . .”

Filed Under: The Line, Video

David Lynch’s Dadaist Apocalypse Via Twin Peaks

September 1, 2017 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

Episode 8
by Alci Rengifo

Madness grips the airwaves like a deafening transmission, and the overlords of the earth seem to speak in terrifyingly grim visions. Thank the gods that every age produces its own soothsayers. It is fitting, then, that just as a surreal state of affairs takes hold, David Lynch returned to us with Twin Peaks: The Return, a continuation of his landmark cult 1990s series that combined melodrama with the director’s brand of surrealist imaginings. But not only did Lynch return, he also shows himself to be fully in tune with these new dark ages. Episode 8 of the revival in particular goes beyond television or even cinema — it is one mad flow about our civilization’s communion with dark forces to unleash absolute destruction. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

The New Avant-Garde: David Lynch’s Glorious Late-Career Vision

August 24, 2017 By C von Hassett 5 Comments

Episode 3
by C von Hassett

The new Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) finds David Lynch working in fresh and sublimely haunting domains, ones that pleasurably flirt or unnervingly skirt the spectral drop-offs of some charged and sinister abyss. This seems no visional or evolutional change of tack, nor does it appear, at least in these early episodes, Lynch is newly surveying unmapped terrains. Rather, there is something more elevated in this late-career landscape, and something far more intimate as well. One senses, when viewing this new series, particularly his excursions into Lynchian Other-Realms, that his articulation of these doppelgänging worlds feel more experiential than conceptual, more occupied than conceptualized.

Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3
Cinema Disordinaire: Twin Peaks, Episode 3

Less dream (or dreamy) than earlier movements into surrealist expression, the first quarter of Episode 3, for instance, shows Lynch, in an extraordinary way, to be as clear-eyed and sure-footed as he’s ever been in these ghostly yet thoroughly gripping realms. It’s as if, rather than imagining, some doppelgänger of himself now inhabits these realms, sending in return faint coordinates and word; or Lynch, figuratively, has set foot in them himself, excursioned through them in a near-corporeal way, and now with intimate familiarity he is able to speak cinematically to their airy constructions, and he does this with such nuance that they feel like alternate extents of consciousness and being: expansive, elusive, wholly mercurial states of mind-borne self. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line

David Lynch’s The Amputee

July 13, 2017 By C von Hassett 2 Comments

1973. David Lynch had been shooting Eraserhead for roughly one year when he ran out of cash. The film was suddenly and indefinitely on hold. It was, he says, “a depressing time.” It was also this time that the American Film Institute asked a friend of his, Fred, to shoot a test using two different black and white video stocks to determine which stock was best, because, as Lynch tells it, “they were going to buy a bunch.” Lynch says when he heard AFI was buying video tapes, “it gave me a sadness, and I worried they were going to have to change the name of the place” (from American Film Institute to American Video Institute). “So I looked at Fred, and I got an idea, and I said, um, ‘Fred, does it matter what you shoot?’ And he said, ‘Well, what are you talking about?” And I said ‘Could you shoot anything you want? Twice. One with one stock and one with the other, and go like that, for the test?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t see why not.’ So I said, ‘Could I write something and make something for tomorrow?’ And he said, ‘Okay.’”

That evening Lynch wrote The Amputee. The next day he shot this video:

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Film, The Line, Video

The Primitive, Expressive Figurations Of David Lynch

February 14, 2017 By Christopher Michno 2 Comments

Works On Paper And Sculpture
Art Los Angeles Contemporary / Kayne Griffin Corcoran
By Christopher Michno

At this year’s Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the international contemporary art fair of the West Coast, the Los Angeles gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran devoted its booth to a display of 46 works on paper and two mixed media sculptures by David Lynch. The four day affair, running January 26-29, 2017, offered a dense sampling of the 70 year old artist’s drawings and watercolors, the majority of which were dated from 2008 through 2014. Though most of these works have been previously exhibited, it was a welcome reprise, and Lynch’s works on paper addressed threads that also repeatedly emerge in the auteur’s better known film oeuvre—the desire to probe the unconscious mind, the sense of the uncanny, the need to stare directly into the murky depths of humanity’s darkness. But as is the nature of small works on paper, they are quieter than his film work, and more reflective. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Patti Smith And David Lynch Speak Of Film, Music, And The Creative Impulse

February 13, 2017 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Interview, The Line, Video

Into the Abyss With Jonathan Glazer’s Feral Short: The Fall

December 4, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Jonathan Glazer emerges every so often with work that above all is constructed by a powerful aesthetic. More than narratives, what Glazer crafts are images combined with soundscapes which immerse the viewer in moments of dread, hallucination and discovery. Moments which could have the feel of a common day action suddenly take on a dreamlike ambiance. In Glazer’s underrated 2004 film, Birth, Nicole Kidman plays an upper class New Yorker confronted with the possibility that a young boy is her reincarnated husband. His 2013 Under the Skin finds a silent woman played by Scarlett Johansson, an extraterrestrial in human form, drives through grey streets seeking male prospects for the purpose of consuming their physical essence for an unclear plan. In both films familiar settings, whether upscale dinner parties or gritty alleyways, are touched by extreme possibilities. But how does the artist respond to the world when it actually does become extreme? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

October 18, 2019 By Lita Barrie Leave a Comment

at Luis De Jesus (through October 26)
Reviewed by Lita Barrie

Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts with a deviant sexual subtext recalling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This irresistible mix of dexterity, decor, decorum and deviance makes viewing her paintings a guilty pleasure — rather like sneaking into a peep show or secretly spying on neighbor’s forbidden acts. We can view the conventions of art, cinema and domestic life through a bemused female gaze with no-holds-barred on taking delight in human foibles.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Surreal Spirit Of Salvador Simo Busom’s Buñuel In The Labyrinth Of The Turtles

August 27, 2019 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

An animated movie by GKIDS Films about one of the great iconoclasts and rebels of the cinema is fittingly surreal when the subject in question is Luis Buñuel. The Spanish master has been conjured in numerous films about other people over the years, from his comic-light appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to Little Ashes, an altogether not uninteresting drama about Buñuel’s broken friendship with Salvador Dali. That, too, was a surreal experience in that Dali was interpreted no less by Robert Pattinson. I have to report, however, that this new animated feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, is till now the best dramatization of Buñuel’s early years, since it’s illustrated approach is free to imagine the master’s mind as a landscape of distorting dreams while still wisely interpreting the world around him. Director Salvador Simo also understands something elemental about Surrealism as a movement: that it was not simply about trippy images but, perhaps more so, about the revolutionary transformation of life and the world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Visions of the Age: A Top 10 Of 2018

December 19, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

by Alci Rengifo

It is the cinema which chronicles the passions, nightmares and dreams of an era. To look back at the movies of any given decade is to peer into the very fabric of an age’s consciousness. We are currently living through a period of historical transition, a moment Gramsci would recognize as a moment when an old world is beginning to die and what will come forth we do not yet know. Paris is burning, new parties worship the cult of blood and land. This helps explain why much of the year’s defining cinema obsesses itself with the past, the present and an aching uncertainty over what is to come. Yet some movies were also full of hope and tenderness, wisdom and the reverie of romance. I spent much of this year in darkened screening rooms all over Los Angeles. Whether in a hidden corner of Rodeo Drive or in some distant multiplex in Burbank, I found myself moved, exhilarated or challenged with despair. Here are ten offerings which defined the year in film, and crystalize our place in this current passage of time. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Moth Costume In Hammer Projects: Petrit Halilaj

October 3, 2018 By Emily Nimptsch Leave a Comment

at Hammer Museum (Through January 20, 2019)
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

While butterflies dancing on a sunlit breeze may epitomize the ephemeral as well as beauty, hope, and transformation, for Kosovan installation artist Petrit Halilaj, the oft-forgotten moth is a far more resilient and tenacious totem. In his eponymous Los Angeles debut currently on display at the Hammer Museum, this celebrated conceptualist shines a light on these nocturnal insects and their many symbolic meanings. Here Halilaj collaborates with his mother to present a poignant collection of oversized moth costumes made with traditional Kosovar tapestries, including qilim and dyshek carpets. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Visions of Fire and Fury In Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy

September 27, 2018 By Alci Rengifo 1 Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The mythological still channels our innermost desires. Myths crystalize what we wish to be, or how we would like to divide the world in terms of good and evil, with a simplicity that is crystalline. This same mythic power fuels Mandy, a wild and haunting cinematic creation. A hallucinatory film with the logic of a nightmare, it manages to combine camp, horror and moments of profound drama in a bizarre yet beautiful canvas. Director Panos Cosmatos announces himself here as an original talent on par with other recent masters of trippy cinema like Nicolas Winding Refn or Guy Maddin. Yet while Cosmatos may bask in the kind of outrageous, visceral creativity more common in post-modern experimentation, his film is a myth forged out of deep fires. It is not an exaggeration to call it Homeric, for it is a journey that feels classic even as it takes place in a modern world. Completing this film’s strange power is Nicolas Cage, who delivers a performance of astounding fury, as if he were a fanatic engaged in holy war. There is a lot of blood in Mandy, as well as chainsaws, burning buildings, drugs and even animation, but it’s never shallow or stale. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Mandy

September 27, 2018 By CvH Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

The mythological still channels our innermost desires. Myths crystalize what we wish to be, or how we would like to divide the world in terms of good and evil, with a simplicity that is crystalline. This same mythic power fuels Mandy, a wild and haunting cinematic creation. A hallucinatory film with the logic of a nightmare, it manages to combine camp, horror and moments of profound drama in a bizarre yet beautiful canvas. Director Panos Cosmatos announces himself here as an original talent on par with other recent masters of trippy cinema like Nicolas Winding Refn or Guy Maddin. Yet while Cosmatos may bask in the kind of outrageous, visceral creativity more common in post-modern experimentation, his film is a myth forged out of deep fires. It is not an exaggeration to call it Homeric, for it is a journey that feels classic even as it takes place in a modern world. Completing this film’s strange power is Nicolas Cage, who delivers a performance of astounding fury, as if he were a fanatic engaged in holy war. There is a lot of blood in Mandy (2018), as well as chainsaws, burning buildings, drugs and even animation, but it’s never shallow or stale. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

Streaming Strange Consciousness, And Glorious Cataclysms, In Blake Williams’s Prototype

September 21, 2018 By Alci Rengifo Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

One cannot simply write a review of Blake Williams’s immersive, hypnotic experimental film Prototype. It is more appropriate to comment on this film as the description of an experience. Whether taken in as a 3D experience or as a standard, 2D film, Protoype attempts to create an environment with the very idea of cinema itself. Cinema in its most primal form is a collection of images, rushing one after the other, weaving a tapestry. Williams’s work has a kinship with the early avant-garde cinema which experimented with the marriage of image and narrative, producing works which today have a dreamlike intensity. This intensity comes from the passage of time, because now these films can feel like a transmission from some other age or world. Herman G. Weinberg’s 1931 “film poem,” Autumn Fire, is such a film, with its silent black white imagery of nature, a wandering man in silhouette, a daydreaming woman and breezy waters. As modern pop culture came to be in the 1960s, artists like Andy Warhol would push the very boundaries of what cinema as an art form even meant. His 7-hour Empire is simply one still shot of the Empire State Building. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Prototype

June 17, 2018 By CvH Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

By Alci Rengifo

One cannot simply write a review of Blake Williams’s immersive, hypnotic experimental film Prototype (2017). It is more appropriate to comment on this film as the description of an experience. Whether taken in as a 3D experience or as a standard, 2D film, Protoype attempts to create an environment with the very idea of cinema itself. Cinema in its most primal form is a collection of images, rushing one after the other, weaving a tapestry. Williams’s work has a kinship with the early avant-garde cinema which experimented with the marriage of image and narrative, producing works which today have a dreamlike intensity. This intensity comes from the passage of time, because now these films can feel like a transmission from some other age or world. Herman G. Weinberg’s 1931 “film poem,” Autumn Fire, is such a film, with its silent black white imagery of nature, a wandering man in silhouette, a daydreaming woman and breezy waters. As modern pop culture came to be in the 1960s, artists like Andy Warhol would push the very boundaries of what cinema as an art form even meant. His 7-hour Empire is simply one still shot of the Empire State Building. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Cinema Disordinaire

The City as an Abyss of Dreams: Michael Chrisoulakis’s Los Angeles Overnight

March 20, 2018 By Riot Material Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Los Angeles. The city is damned and neon-lit, devourer of the modern-day wanderer in search of gold and social stability, like some hip reincarnation of the Conquistadors. Pauline Kael once wrote that L.A. is the city “where people have given in to the beauty that always looks unreal.” This is ever so true about those glassy-eyed souls who leave home to settle into this pitiless city to make a dream reality, or at least come close to touching it. Director Michael Chrisoulakis’s Los Angeles Overnight is a true and raw portrait of the spirit of LA, even if the film masquerades as an engaging dark comedy—which it no less is. Flirting with surrealism, this low-budget film moves with an immersive energy and a dark heart. It takes the romanticized image of the struggling artist trying to get a call back and twists it back into its true self, full of despair and willing to indulge in the criminal netherworld. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

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The New Word

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When we say the world is haunted
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The Line

The Lesson. Enrique Martinez Celaya’s current exhibition at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, is reviewed at RIot Material magazine.

Enrique Martínez Celaya’s The Tears of Things

at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles ( through November 2) Reviewed by Lita Barrie Enrique Martínez Celaya’s haunting exhibition at Kohn Gallery is conceived as visual poetry predicated upon Virgil’s phrase “the tears of things,” from Aeneid ( Book 1, line 462), about an encounter with a mural of the battle of Troy which made the […]

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Atmosphere So Thick You’ll Choke: Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast […]

Pink Peep (detail). Laura Krifka's latest exhibition at Luis De Jesus is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier art magazine.

Laura Krifka’s Wickedly Deviant The Game of Patience

at Luis De Jesus (through October 26) Reviewed by Lita Barrie Laura Krifka enjoys doing things she is not supposed to do. Having absorbed the tenets of neoclassical painting, she bypasses high-minded seriousness by adding a candy-coated veneer of hyper-artificiality adopted from 1950s MGM musicals to the domestic decor of private scenes she then undercuts […]

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13) Reviewed by John Haber No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? […]

Swans' Leaving Meaning, Various Personnel. Leaving Meaning is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and sound.

Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning

out October 25 on Young God Records Reviewed by John Payne Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which […]

The Vast of Night, dir. by Andrew Patterson, is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and film

In Jaw-Dropping Homage To The Twilight Zone, The Exhilarating The Vast of Night

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko There’s something in the air on a crisp night in 1950s Cayuga, New Mexico. Sure, there’s excitement as basketball season begins with a game so anticipated that nearly the entirety of this rural town has convened upon the high school’s gymnasium. But then there’s something stranger, a crackle on the phone […]

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner …there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all Bob Dylan The painter’s first duty is to be free Philip Guston In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in […]

Betye Saar’s Call and Response, at LACMA, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine, LA's premier art magazine.

Process And Fierce Redemption In Betye Saar’s Call and Response

at LACMA (through April 5, 2020) Reviewed by Genie Davis Betye Saar’s riveting, 40-object exhibition currently at LACMA offers a fascinating insight into the artist’s process. It’s strong focus on the power of redemptive faith and personal strength in the face of adversity is passionate and compelling – which can be frankly said of all Saar’s […]

Virgil Abloh, from Figures of Speech. Reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and fashion

Audacious Digs In Virgil Abloh’s Figures of Speech

at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Reviewed by Seren Sensei In a short video clip during Figures of Speech, Virgil Abloh’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, he mused on his upbringing and influences. Born the son of Ghanaian immigrants in a small town in Illinois, he discussed the wonders of growing […]

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s This Is It. As part of Apple's [AR]T Walk, reviewed at Riot Material.

Lightly Through The Looking Glass With Apple’s [AR]T Walk

By Mayne Alert the critics: The cutting edge of New York City’s art avantgarde can now be found at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Amid the blistering doldrums of summer, Apple has offered [AR]T Walk a guided tour of their new augmented reality exhibit. Co-curated with the New Museum, the tour is being offered in five […]

Antonio Banderas and Nora Navas in Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria), directed by Pedro Almodóvar and reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

Reviewed by John Payne Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, […]

Review of Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory at Riot Material magazine

Hiroko Oyamada’s Mordant Fable, The Factory

Reviewed by John Biscello The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada New Directions, 128pp., $13.95 The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s […]

Peter Doig, Music (2 Trees). Doig's latest exhibition is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Corrosion And Other Maladies In Peter Doig’s Latest, Paintings

Paintings, at Michael Werner Gallery, London (16 November) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones With Peter Doig – who has a collection of new paintings on show at the Michael Werner Gallery, London – corrosion is paramount. His paintings seek to overturn themselves from within, alluding to altered states, to dreams and hallucinations. His paint has become […]

Alexandra Masangkay in The Platform (El Hoyo) 2019, reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art and film,

A Movable Feast In The Dystopic The Platform

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko Imagine: you awake in a cold, concrete prison cell. There are no windows, no doors, one cellmate, and a big, square hole in the center of the floor. Should you peek down into it, you’d see a cell below the same as yours. And beneath that lie so many more that […]

Robert Gunderman's latest exhibition, This End, is reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier art and culture magazine.

Transits Through Finalities In Robert Gunderman’s This End

at AF Projects, Los Angeles (through October 12) Reviewed by Eve Wood Robert Gunderman’s current exhibition at AF Projects could be understood as both a meditation on the nature of time and an investigation into the elusiveness of memory. The title of the exhibition, This End, powerfully yet simply encapsulates and personalizes the idea of transition […]

The Lodge, the follow up film to Goodnight Mommy, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine.

The Lodge Offers a Chilling Follow-Up To Goodnight Mommy

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is […]

Takashi Miike's First Love, reviewed at Riot Material, LA's premier magazine for art, film, and forward-leaning thought.

Takashi Miike’s First Love Is A Delightfully Earnest Rom-Com Set To An Onslaught Of Slaughter

Reviewed by Kristy Puchko As you might anticipate, First Love is a story of boy meets girl, but coming from Takashi Miike, the visionary director behind Ichi the Killer, Audition, and 13 Assasins, you might rightly anticipate this romantic-comedy is less flowers and kisses and more yakuzas and blood. There is also a high-kicking revenge […]

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Writers

  • Alci Rengifo
  • Ann Landi
  • Annabel Osberg
  • A. Hutter von Arx
  • Barrett Martin
  • Barrett Warner
  • C von Hassett
  • Christopher Michno
  • Christopher P Jones
  • CvH
  • Cynthia Biret
  • Donald Lindeman
  • Ellen C. Caldwell
  • Emily Nimptsch
  • Erin Currier
  • Eve Wood
  • Genie Davis
  • Henry Cherry
  • Hoyt Hilsman
  • Jill Conner
  • Johanna Drucker
  • John Biscello
  • John Haber
  • John Payne
  • Kristy Puchko
  • Lita Barrie
  • Lorraine Heitzman
  • Nancy Kay Turner
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RIOT MATERIAL
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