When sports fans think about dynasties, there are certain names that come to mind.  The New York Yankees have dominated Major League Baseball for nearly a hundred years.  The Chicago Bulls of the nineties ruled the basketball courts.  The National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers won five Super Bowls in the eighties and early nineties.  But perhaps the most successful dynasty of all time worked its magic on the ice, and we’re not talking about the Montreal Canadiens.  For a long time, the most feared hockey team on the planet was the USSR Men’s National Ice Hockey Team, and they are the subject of a fascinating new documentary called Red Army.

In the horror world, low-budget movies are just as much (if not more) fun than their big Hollywood brethren.  Amongst the modern B-Movie pioneers are a number of influential auteurs who have paved the way for those who have come later.  Guys like Roger Corman (A Bucket of Blood, Bloody Mama) and Lloyd Kaufman (The Toxic Avenger) have proven that anyone with a little creativity and a lot of perseverance can make movies.  Another one of these guys is Charles Band, whose production company Empire Pictures, and later Full Moon Pictures, has been behind great movies like Crawlspace and Tourist Trap.  As a director, one of Band’s more ambitious ideas involved getting together with six other directors to make a not-really-an-anthology anthology movie called Ragewar.

Hollywood lost another one of its shining stars this last weekend when Louis Jourdan, the debonair French character actor, passed away at the age of 93.  Throughout his long and storied career, Jourdan worked with Hitchcock, played Count Dracula, and lent his voice talents to Scooby-Doo cartoons.  He is best known to movie fans as the suave leading man in the musical Gigi and the villain in the Bond film Octopussy, but the horror community remembers him for another role; in 1982, Jourdan played the antagonistic Dr. Arcane in Swamp Thing.

David Cronenberg successfully transitioned from low-budget sci-fi horror to “legitimate” filmmaking with A History of Violence in 2005.  Although Cronenberg is now known as a big Hollywood moviemaker with reputable films like Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method on his resume, horror fans will always remember the man for his early films, slimy science fiction body-horror movies like The Brood and Scanners.  The last really weird movie he made, in 1999, was eXistenZ.

They say that there are only so many story ideas to go around, and that everything is influenced by something else.  This theory is never more true than when it is applied to horror films, where even the best slasher or haunted house movie is indicative of an earlier movie; let’s face it – Devil’s Due is basically Rosemary’s Baby and Ouija is essentially Witchboard.  Some are pretty obvious (basically, all vampire movies can be traced back to Nosferatu), but many are subtle.  In 1931, Universal Studios made the definitive version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, turning Boris Karloff into a horror legend.  Sixty years later, in 1991, one of the more clever variations of the Frankenstein tale was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public when Body Parts was released.

One of the most effective things that a horror movie can do is take a seemingly innocuous presence and turn it into something frightening.  A popular subject for this treatment is insects; everyone sees them every day without much thought, but when a movie makes them go haywire, it’s terrifying.  Whether it is ants, like in Phase IV, or bees, such as in The Deadly Bees, insects can be effective movie antagonists.  In 1988, The Nest brought another insect into the spotlight, one that already had a bad reputation as a creepy-crawly: the cockroach.

Adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith (who also wrote "Strangers on a Train," the basis for Hitchcock's classic), The Two Faces of January is a brightly painted portrait drenched in noirish tendencies.

Around the same time that Motown Records was doing its thing in the big city of Detroit, Stax records was recording and releasing music down south in Memphis.  The output from these two labels represented the best of what American music had to offer, and continued well into the days of the British Invasion of the mid-sixties.  Although Motown had more chart success and record sales, Stax had the attitude; the cool mix of blues, gospel, funk, and jazz that became a recognizable sound all its own.  Director Martin Shore tells the Stax story, but not in the traditional way, in his new documentary Take Me to the River.

If you have not seen Frank, stop at the end of this paragraph and go see it.  Do not check IMDB, watch a trailer, or read any reviews or publicity materials for the film, just go see it.  The rest of this article will deal with a spoiler that is not really a spoiler, because just about all promotional materials for the film make it common knowledge.  But, Frank is the kind of movie where the surprise reveal of the identity of the title character is a key aspect of the effectiveness of the film.  So do not pass go, do not collect $200, just go watch Frank.  We’ll be right here.

Meet Wetlands' Helen (Carla Juri). She is in her post-teen years, still lives at home, is quite pretty with her tomboy haircut that is juxtaposed with her liking for very short shirts. She is a tiny bit insecure, and extremely precocious; exhibiting a child-like sense in her very much young adult body. Helen is also extremely vulgar in everything that she does. Obsessed with sex, sexuality, and pushing the boundaries of appropriateness there is no end to what Helen will do. Or what those around her will be compelled to do by her influence. Helen is, in a word, amazing. Solely for the fact that she exhibits everything that is wrong for a girl of her age, and you instantly fall in love with her because of this fact.

Rich Hill, Missouri, is a small town of less than 1400 located about 90 minutes south of Kansas City.  The town’s citizens are a mixture of the working class and the poverty stricken, but they hold on to hope.  A new documentary, simply called Rich Hill, paints a picture of the town as seen through the eyes of three of its residents, all teenaged boys.

Jimi: All Is By My Side is a film with multiple problems serious enough that the couple of very good things it has going for it stand little chance of compensating. As written and directed by 12 Years A Slave scribe John Ridley, the narrative sets off down familiar musical biopic lane: musician discovered; gains success; deals with distractions and behaves badly; and that's it.. Perhaps because the production was denied the use of Hendrix's music by his estate (holding out for full control of the production), the story ends in mid-1967, with Jimi and his Experience trooping off to Monterey and international fame.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Electric Daisy Carnival, an electronic dance music festival held in several different locations all over the world during the summer months.  The festival brings fans together into a musical circus-like atmosphere for three days of non-stop partying.  The largest of these gatherings is the one that takes place in Las Vegas, NV, and that is the one that is at the center of Under the Electric Sky.

In Yiddish, the word “mensch” refers to “a person of integrity and honor.”  One would not think that it would be a term that could apply a showbiz manager, but it is the best description for Shep Gordon.  Even those who have never heard of Shep Gordon are probably familiar with his clients.  He’s one of the entertainment industry’s most powerful players, having represented musical heavyweights like Alice Cooper, Anne Murray, and Teddy Pendergrass.  His list of A-list friends is exponentially longer than his artist stable, and the guest lists to his famous parties read like a who’s-who of Hollywood.  And every one of these friends and acquaintances has nothing but good things to say about him.  He’s more than a mensch, he’s a Supermensch, hence the title of the intriguing documentary about his life and times, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon.

“I don’t know if they’re here, or have ever been here, but I definitely do believe in them.”  William Eubank, director of The Signal ponders the existence of aliens and UFOs.  It’s a fair question; The Signal is all about the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Earth, and Eubank’s first film, Love, was produced and scored by the rock band Angels & Airwaves, whose famous frontman, Tom Delonge, is an outspoken alien conspiracist.  Eubank speaks fondly of Delonge - “I’ve sat in his backyard many a time with night vision goggles, looking at the sky.  He’s a good dude.”

Water is something we all take for granted.  We couldn’t exist without it, yet we only think about it when it’s running scarce.  We use it to cook, clean, work, and play, and we do it all on a daily basis.  Renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky has teamed up with filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal (Payback) to pay tribute to the most overlooked and underappreciated of the Classical Elements in the documentary Watermark.

In 2007, a young realtor named John Maloof was looking for pictures of different areas of Chicago for a book that he was compiling.  He bought a storage unit for $380 that contained thousands of negatives and a bunch of undeveloped rolls of film.  When he examined the negatives, he saw some of the most captivating street photography that had ever been taken.  He knew that he was onto something, so he snooped around the locker a bit more and found pieces of mail addressed to a woman named Vivian Maier.  Seeing that there was a story developing, he enlisted producer Charlie Siskel (“Tosh.0”) to help him tell it, and the resulting documentary is Finding Vivian Maier.