A Takashi Miike film. Don’t be afraid. Jump into his cinematic world. While he isn’t always perfect, good or bad, his films hold unique and fascinating wonders for cinephiles.

“First Love” ("Hatsukoi" in the original Japanese, is Miike’s best film since 2010’s “13 Assassins.” This is a wild ride but just wild enough. Being a Miike film, we are treated to scenes

I’m always skeptical when a film receives too much hype. With the on-again, off-again quality of American fare, I try not to set my hopes too high, especially when it comes to a film about the D.C. Comics's The Joker, by the director of “The Hangover” series.

It is with great pleasure that I report that, while the film itself isn’t the cinematic masterpiece that some have christened it, Todd Phillips’s “Joker” is one of the finest films of 2019 with Joaquin Phoenix delivering one of the great performances of modern cinema, and definitely his personal best.

Rob Zombie’s latest film “3 From Hell” is the third film in his Firefly Clan trilogy and quite simply one of his best ones. This is a blood-soaked homage to the seventies grindhouse films that Zombie grew up admiring and the kind of wild genre craziness that became a major influence on both his music and directorial style.

This is intense genre filmmaking on high levels. Zombie has been coasting for some years

Mexico City in the nineties was a place where the harshest crimes went unpunished due to money and a corrupt police force.

Aida (an excellent and tortured performance from Diana Lein, an actress to watch!) serves up revenge for young women who have been raped and maltreated and weren’t able to find resolution on their own.

Working out of the back of a nightclub, the women

Whether you like Bruce Springsteen or not, I dare any viewer of this movie not to be completely swept away by the pure joy of the infectious “Blinded by the Light.”

Inspired by Sarfraz Manzoor’s 2007 memoir “Greetings from Bury Park,” the film “is inspired by the words and music of Bruce Springsteen.”

Set in 1987 Luton (a working-class town in southeast England)

In the eighties and nineties independent film was in its heyday. Many great “human” comedies came out of this era. Before giant Hollywood romcoms, little films filled with relationship-related comedy were plentiful, with many of them being highly entertaining.

Writer/director Joshua Land’s new Maryland-set film “I Like Me” (co-written by Abby Sussman) has a mid-nineties

San Francisco’s Castro District is known for its historical importance in the LGBTQ community, most famously for the election of Harvey Milk as the first openly gay elected official in California’s history. The Castro is used quite differently in the new independent comedy “Bathrooms Stalls & Parking Lots.”

Coming from Brazil, Leo (the film’s writer/director Thales Correa) arrives in San Francisco’s