Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is really about have for years surged madly and memorably--especially online, where the Internet's dead ends, blind links, and back-where-you-started arguments just might be another part of the impossible labyrinth Kubrick planned all along. (They're not.) The most compelling of these theories have been assembled into the remarkable film Room 237, a copyright-flouting essay hitting the IFC Center on March 28. According to one of the theorists interviewed in it, Kubrick was "the megabrain of the planet" boiling down all of existence into a "movie dream" that he "shines" into us even today.

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John McClane sneering at the title of the newest Die Hard film

You won't be able to tell, superficially, that Bruce Willis has aged--his level of baldness has remained unchanged since the mid-90s--but there are some signs of wear and tear on the newest, fifth iteration of the long-running Die Hard series, in which Willis stars as detective John McClane. While 1988's Die Hard and 1990's Die Hard 2: Die Harder sported titles that were tight and a little angry--exactly how we want our action heroes--the series appears to have gotten a little bloated in its middle age. The most recent film is called A Good Day to Die Hard. What does that even mean? When exactly is anyone ready to be dead? In the spirit of snark, we present McClane's most spectacular kills from the franchise so far, accompanied by new titles even worse than the dead-on A Good Day to Die Hard.

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Joshua Hertz

Nick Prueher (left) and Joe Pickett hosting the Found Footage Festival.

You name it, they've found it--The do's and don'ts of caring for your ferret, relics from the golden age of Jazzercise, and brazen fourth wall-breakers like "Rent-A-Friend," for very lonely people.

Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have curated the great American garage sale of fringe video, one unintentional artifact at a time.

In 2004 they launched the Found Footage Festival, a showcase of VHS tapes scouted over the past two decades. Now in its sixth edition, the festival has continues to tap these resources for comic gold, touring the country with a mind to save the odd institutional or home video from falling into obscurity (re: a dumpster).

With the festival returning to New York this weekend, Pickett and Prueher share some of their stranger encounters with us, and reveal the true identity of YouTube yo-yo hack Kenny 'K-Strass' Strasser.

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"Are you going to write something really snarky about this movie?," asks Tao Lin. More »

Ever vigilant for things to be outraged by, conservative internet precincts yesterday dropped the bombshell that there's gambling in Casablanca the word "nigger" is spoken in a Quentin Tarantino movie about American slavery.

Since Drudge et al. haven't actually seen the movie, they just go with the numbers, cherrypicked from an admiring Hollywood Reporter review. "Nigger" is spoken 100-plus times in Django Unchained, just about as often as you might hear in an afternoon at Mel Gibson's house. (Drudge's recent Django-related race-baiting has been well cataloged by Gawker.)

Drudge ignores context and Tarantino's artistic aims, of course. (We'll get to those below.) Instead, Drudge just puts the very fact out it there, apparently hoping that it illustrates two weary complaints of white conservatives: 1. That liberals are at best hypocritical and at worst the real racists; 2. That if white conservatives have to watch what they say, than everyone else does, too. The assumption is that Tarantino's film is, by math, 100 or so times worse than, say, the Fox Nation commenter who just spews it once.

Here's what they're missing.

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When the filmmakers behind 99% The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film were raising money for their project last fall, they framed their project as an experiment in collective creation that mirrored their subject. As they wrote on their Kickstarter page, "In a process that mirrors the OWS movement itself, 60+ award-winning filmmakers & artists are making a film about it. Together."

Since then, the film has raised more than $20,000 on Kickstarter and won a development grant from the Sundance Institute. But the full extent of the filmmakers' commitment to the radical collectivism of Occupy Wall Street is being challenged by another filmmaker, who has used snippets of their footage in his own work without their permission and is refusing their requests to remove it.

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Film critic Karina Longworth is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

For maybe the first hour of Yellow (written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, the man responsible for the national treasure that is The Notebook), I kept thinking about another film premiering here in Toronto, Frances Ha, co-written by and starring Greta Gerwig, and co-written and directed by Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale).

Frances Ha is a jazzy, black-and-white microbudget comedy of awkwardness about a drifting 20-something (Gerwig) who falls from limb to limb when her long-time best girl friend (Mickey Sumner) de facto "dumps" Frances to move into a swanky neighborhood and hook up with a boring boyfriend. Yellow is a magical realist technicolor drug movie about a pill-popping aging beauty (Heather Wahlquist) who burns her last bridge in L.A. and must return to the hick town where she's been storing her skeletons.

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Film critic Karina Longworth is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

The best, most daring and form-defying documentaries in the world right now are being funded by the Danish Film Institute, and so it goes that the nonfiction knockout of TIFF thus far is The Act of Killing -- made with Danish support and directed by American Joshua Oppenheimer, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog.

Hot on the heels of the US premiere of The Ambassador, like Mads Brugger's film Killing uses performance and fictionalization to lay bare shocking truths about the flow of power in a third-world state, but Oppenheimer's moving, horrifying, ethically problematic film couldn't possibly have higher stakes. A testament: one of the producers and co-directors, and most of the Indonesian production staff, are listed in the credits as "Anonymous."

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This is a blog post about two movies that were screened for the press within the first 24 hours of the Toronto Film Festival, both of which feature three-way sex scenes. In Spring Breakers, characters played by James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson "do it" in a swimming pool; in Do Not Disturb, a French remake of the 2009 American indie Humpday, a bisexual couple played by Asia Argento and Charlotte Gainsbourg seduce a drifter played by François Cluzet. I am mentioning these facts at the beginning of this blog posts in order to attract people who search the internet for information about movie sex scenes -- a segment of the human population which, Google Analytics suggests, far out number the segment which actually, like, cares about cinema. To the sex scene searchers, I say, welcome! We will get to what you came here looking for in a moment. But first, a brief primer on French cultural theory.

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Alex Nahon and Chris Rock on the set of 2 Days in New York [photo: Marie Komphavong]

Almost two years ago, I walked into our conference room here at the Voice, and was startled to see Manu standing there.

If you're as much a Julie Delpy fan as I am and couldn't get enough of her directorial debut, 2007's 2 Days in Paris, you might understand my thrill. "Manu" -- goofball, womanizer, says anything that pops into his head -- was one of the many little delights of the film, and here he was in our building, in the flesh. Or at least, it was Alex Nahon, the actor who played him.

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