Pat Padua

1 week ago | spectrumculture.com | Pat Padua

There’s a moment in the misbegotten, long-delayed comic book adaptation Brenda Starr where you can, for a few precious seconds, see all the promise of its mischievous cartoon glee—and it’s almost a throwaway shot. Somewhere in the Amazon, in the middle of a convoluted plot point that does not bear repeating, our star reporter (Brooke Shields) plants her Amazonian gams on a pair of crocodiles and rides them like water skis in pursuit of fame and fortune.

1 month ago | washingtoncitypaper.com | Alan Zilberman |Serena Zets |Pat Padua |Louis Jacobson |Hannah Docter-Loeb

Thanks for being a member of City Paper! There is more to Spanish cinema than Pedro Almodóvar. We can’t deny that the director is a master of the form, but there are plenty of treasures beyond his prolific output. Co-sponsored by the Embassy of Spain and AFI Silver, the mini-festival Spanish Cinema Now! includes provocative films across many genres—without input from the beloved auteur.

1 month ago | spectrumculture.com | Pat Padua

Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina; Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann; Hugo Haas and Cleo Moore? A B-movie auteur and his frequent star may not be placed high in the canon of celluloid collaborators. But with limited resources, the pair was a reliable and lucrative staple of mid-century entertainment, never mind the bad reviews. And the journeyman writer-director-producer had a little more up his sleeve than the standard-issue crime drama by which he usually plied his trade.

1 month ago | spectrumculture.com | Pat Padua

For all the simplicity of the title, Bound, the word holds multiple meanings for writer-director Isaac Hirotsu Woofter. His feature debut traffics in the physical prison of a cage, but also broken family ties and the seemingly inescapable trap of mental illness. What begins as a sharp coming-of-age drama nearly gets lost in the weeds of a complicated crime thriller. But for the most part, the ensemble cast, largely made up of stage veterans like Woofter, sells the film’s harrowing emotional arc.

1 month ago | spectrumculture.com | Pat Padua

What was it like growing up in Germany after the traumas of World War II? What was the burgeoning counterculture like in Europe ‘68? Could Faust have been the next Beatles? What was David Niven doing at a Can show? These and many more questions get answers straight from the prog horse’s mouth in Christoph Dallach’s Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock. There’s plenty of motorik minutiae for the aficionado playing inside modular baseball.