Breaking the Rules
The first five minutes of Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut — the uncommonly smart, genuinely funny, generously humane teen comedy Booksmart — are so full of … Continue reading
Rick Levin
Staff writer for Eugene Weekly, Rick Levin been airing his grievances in newspapers for the better part of two decades.
Author: Rick Levin
Blockbuster
In a Netflix age, Broadway Metro is expanding downtown
If movies represent our collective dreams of modern myth — our populist religion — then movie theaters could be considered our modern churches, our secular … Continue reading
The Ballad of Kena and Ziki
Two women dare forbidden love in director Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki
Two beautiful, spirited young women living in a bustling urban capital meet up, crush out, flirt, fall in love. It’s rough going for them — … Continue reading
Math Problems
Life is more than a theory in VLT’s production of the Pulitzer-winning drama Proof
Genius is to insanity as freedom is to bondage as family is to isolation as heaven is to hell: These dichotomies fall apart in our … Continue reading
East of Eden
Director Claire Denis sends convicts into a black hole
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in the universe darker and more glorious and fucked-up than a human being. We are such singular … Continue reading
Leaving Key West
Matthew McConaughey is an alcoholic poet in Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum
Harmony Korine emerged in 1995 as foremost gutter-punk bad boy of Gen X filmmakers, a beautiful loser who mirrored on screen the raw nihilistic yowl … Continue reading
Lost in Yonkers
VLT mines the myth of simpler times in the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!
Imagine living in an era of this American continent when being “half a millionaire” was more than enough juice to make you the leading citizen … Continue reading
We Have Seen the Enemy
Director Jordan Peele delivers a disconcerting hall of mirrors in Us
Yesterday I wrote a review of Jordan Peele’s new movie, Us, which unexpectedly blew up the box office this past weekend. Unlike most reviews, which … Continue reading
Anatomy in Motion, for a Cause
flex Studio’s dance performance “FLEX*A*TOM*I*CAL” to benefit CSS
Promising to take the audience on “an interactive, physical and metaphysical ride through the human body,” Eugene’s flex Studios will host its sixth-annual benefit dance … Continue reading
It’s All Cotton Candy
The thin blue line is erased in director S. Craig Zahler’s glorious heist film Dragged Across Concrete
Keeping things simple, let’s assign the most recent advent of American independent cinema to a single movie, Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape. … Continue reading