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Toronto Star
4 days ago
- Politics
- Toronto Star
In photos: Thousands take to the streets at annual Trans March to kick off Toronto's Pride weekend
Thousands of people take to the streets to stand up for Trans rights during the annual Trans March. Nick Lachance/ Toronto Star
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Two Lost Exploitation Films from Trash-Cult Favorite Andy Milligan Will ‘Re-Premiere' at Tribeca
'It's so funny to me that Andy Milligan has become this great cult figure,' Laura Shaine Cunningham told IndieWire. To Cunningham — an author and playwright who describes her stint in Z-grade movies as 'a totally aberrant episode in my life' — Milligan was a sadist with a reddish beard who did his best to ruin her good time while shooting a movie on a derelict farm outside Woodstock, New York, in 1965. 'He was prolific, but not talented,' she added, a common sentiment even among Milligan's most passionate defenders. And Andy Milligan does have a cult, a small but devoted subgroup fascinated by the contrast between the cracked auteurism of his films and the callous commercialism of their production. 'These are true independent movies, and if you really are inclusive and you really want to spotlight independent filmmaking voices, then Andy Milligan needs to be there,' said Jonathan Penner, programmer at Tribeca Festival, where two Milligan films will screen on Friday, June 13. More from IndieWire Zoe Saldaña Says Her 'Emilia Pérez' Oscar Is 'Trans': The Statue 'Goes by They/Them' The Beautiful, Brutal Action of 'Predator: Killer of Killers' Milligan's films 'will move you,' Penner added. '[They] may not move you in the most pleasant way, which is OK. Not all art is nice. Andy Milligan was not a nice guy, and he didn't make nice movies. But they are near and dear to my heart, because horror movies in general are about fear and suffering and mortality, and Andy made movies about the darkest shit in humanity.' A once-promising independent filmmaker and gay Off-Off-Broadway pioneer, Milligan sold his soul to 42nd Street in the mid-'60s. He did so by joining up with producer William Mishkin, who would provide Milligan with small sums of money to churn out one-take wonders — horror movies and sexploitation pictures, mostly — that ran continuously in grindhouses until the prints wore out. Then, they were thrown away. 'They were considered orphans that nobody cared about,' Jimmy McDonough, author of the Milligan biography 'The Ghastly One,' said. 'Mishkin in particular cared very little about his legacy,' McDonough added. 'He saw it as all very contemporary stuff that you worked to death at the time. Maybe a few more years passed [when] you could get it into a drive-in and fool people into thinking it was in color.' Then Mishkin's son, Lou, took over the business in the mid-'80s. So the story goes, after an interview with Fangoria, where Milligan complained about him, Lou destroyed the remaining films out of spite. 'Melted down for the silver content,' as Severin Films researcher Todd Wieneke put it. As a result, many of the films Milligan made for the Mishkins are now considered lost. But Wieneke kept looking, and after years of searching, he discovered two previously unseen Milligan films, 'The Degenerates' (1967) and 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' (1968). Both were found in Europe, where it's common for unclaimed materials to be sent to national archives when a film company goes into receivership, a practice Wieneke credited to the 'deeply entrenched film cultures' in these countries. 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' was originally shipped to the Netherlands as part of a package of Mishkin films. This particular title, a hysterical New York apartment melodrama in the style of Doris Wishman, was a poor fit for the all-night theaters in Amsterdam's red-light district. And so it 'sat on the shelf, unscreened, not a single blemish on it,' as Wieneke said, for decades. It was eventually sent to the Eye Filmmuseum and kept, unlabeled, in its archive until it was finally catalogued in 2023. McDonough said that 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' is 'the most mainstream of [Milligan's] exploitation pictures, certainly, and perhaps all of his strange pictures.' McDonough credits this to the fact that Milligan didn't write the film — Josef Bush, best known for the cheeky 1968 gay guide 'The Homosexual Handbook', crafted the script from Mishkin's outline. 'Mishkin really felt like this was his 'Star Wars,'' McDonough laughed. The film was a hit on 42nd Street, possessing a certain tawdry entertainment value. It's also a valuable time capsule: 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' contains some of the only known footage of the Caffe Cino, the bohemian West Village coffee shop that nurtured Sam Shepard, Al Pacino, and Andy Milligan. 'The Degenerates,' meanwhile, resurfaced at the Royal Belgian Film Archive. This print's origins are murkier — Wieneke believed it 'fell into private hands' between its initial theatrical run and its rediscovery at the archive. It comes subtitled in French and Flemish, and like 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!,' it was restored by Severin Films after being scanned at the archives. The restorations are clean, but not too clean: Citing 'defects that are native to the print,' Wieneke said, 'sometimes you can fix things, but it's not aesthetically correct to fix them.' 'The Degenerates' is technically science fiction, although it plays more like a feverish blend of 'The Beguiled' and 'Faster, Pussycat! Kill, Kill!' 'It's very much in character with Milligan,' McDonough said. 'There's ranting, there's raving, there's poisonous family dysfunction, and total destruction at the end.' Cunningham sounded amused recounting her scenes in the movie, about a band of six women 'surviving in the post-apocalypse' on a dirt farm in Woodstock. 'I do remember running through the rain with a pitchfork … the whole thing was absolutely ludicrous,' she said. 'Everyone said [Milligan's] films were ungettable. As if they didn't really exist,' Penner said. This is especially true of his sexploitation pictures: The eternal popularity of the genre has ensured that Milligan's horror movies — with colorful titles like 'The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!' — have remained in circulation since the VHS era. But sexploitation is 'a pocket that's never going to be duplicated,' according to Wieneke. 'It's very much a product of its time and the carnivalesque characters who worked behind the scenes.' Penner will attempt to capture the atmosphere of old, gritty 42nd Street at 'That's TribecXploitation! The Andy Milligan Time Machine,' part of the festival's Escape from Tribeca sidebar. 'There's a secret history of the movies in New York, a really profound history on 42nd Street,' Penner said. 'These movies truly will take you back to a different time and place and filmgoing experience, which is very beautiful to me.' Both 'Kiss Me! Kiss Me! Kiss Me!' and 'The Degenerates' will 'world re-premiere' in the program, along with a selection of trailers and commercials meant to capture the look and feel of late-'60s New York. (The festival will also premiere a new documentary, 'The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan,' co-directed by Severin Films' Josh Johnson.) McDonough and Cunningham will make the pilgrimage, as well as Milligan players Natalie Rogers and Hope Stansbury. All will gather for a celebration of Milligan and the grindhouse film culture that made him — minus the street hustlers and discarded needles. 'The idea that we're showing his pictures at the Tribeca Film Festival … his ghost will be there cackling, madly, just laughing his ass off,'' Penner said. 'These movies sank below the bottom of the barrel, and we've fished them out.' For McDonough, who was close with Milligan in the years leading up to Milligan's death from AIDS complications in 1991, the homecoming is personal. 'I feel his presence on a regular basis,' he said. 'When I wrote ['The Ghastly One'], nobody wanted to hear about Andy Milligan … now Andy belongs to the world in a larger fashion. I'm just thrilled that he's finally being acknowledged as the idiosyncratic, unmatched talent that he was.' Asked if he thinks the ghost of Andy Milligan will be present at the screening, McDonough laughed: 'Wear your Kevlar vests is all I have to say. You never know how Andy might strike back — with a kiss, or something sharper.' 'That's TribecXploitation! The Andy Milligan Time Machine' will screen at the Village East by Angelika at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 13 as part of the Tribeca Festival. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Inside' Review: Guy Pearce Delivers Another Incredible Supporting Performance in Australian Prison Drama That Cuts Through All the Bull
The lower-security prisoners in Charles Williams' difficult but deeply penetrating 'Inside' sometimes pass the time by playing the trivia games that are printed on the packaging of their sweets. 'WHO AM I?' the text asks, before offering a series of clues about, say, a Brooklyn-born musician who got his first break when Bette Midler hired him as a pianist. Most of the characters in this decidedly grounded Australian prison drama are too young — and too many worlds removed — to know who Barry Manilow is, let alone guess his identity based on a handful of factoids. But that doesn't stop these men from trying, even if they spend every day of their sentences trying to separate their souls from the bullet points of their own biographies. Are they more than what they've done? The people they've hurt? The situations they were born into? We know they are. Not because they're human, and we have the natural grace to extend these murderers the courtesy of that recognition, but rather because this film wouldn't have any reason to exist if the answer to any of those questions was 'no.' The abundant power of Williams' debut feature — which stems from his experience growing up in an economically dispossessed Victoria town whose jail was like a second home for several of the men in his family — is rooted in the fact that 'Inside' never pretends otherwise. More from IndieWire Zoe Saldaña Says Her 'Emilia Pérez' Oscar Is 'Trans': The Statue 'Goes by They/Them' Two Lost Exploitation Films from Trash-Cult Favorite Andy Milligan Will 'Re-Premiere' at Tribeca This is not a story that labors to earn its prisoners their humanity. On the contrary, it's a story about how their clear and inextinguishable humanity is liable to become a prison unto itself. In the borrowed words of long-time inmate Warren Murfett (a bushy and brilliant Guy Pearce): 'The worst of men have a little bit of good in them, and that'll be their undoing.' Warren is quoting another inmate at the same time as he's mocking the way that some of his fellow convicts try to protect themselves with aphorisms, but some pearls of wisdom are worth carrying around in your pocket like a shiv at the ready. For a man with blood on his hands like Warren, it's that last mote of humanity that might prove to be his doom — the stubborn part of himself that still yearns for redemption, hopes for healing, and strives to make something more of himself before there's nothing left. It's the part of himself that 17-year-old Mel Blight (puppy-eyed newcomer Vincent Miller, wrenchingly credible in his first movie role) is already trying to stamp out by the time Williams' film begins to take shape around him. In his opening voiceover, which floats above the sort of glassy synth music that's meant to numb our judgment, Mel informs us that he was conceived during a conjugal visit when his father was in prison, and that his dad once told him that he was destined to wind up back behind bars. 'And he was right.' A broken home gave way to juvenile detention, and the violence that followed him there saw Mel transferred to general population — not unheard of in a country where kids as young as 10 can be locked away indefinitely. Now that he's inching toward parole, Mel's doing everything in his power to fuck it up. 'They want me to make a story out of it and pretend I've changed,' he says when asked to write a letter of contrition to the boy he beat to death in juvie. 'But I haven't changed. No one does, especially inside.' By 'inside' he means prison, but Williams' delicate script obviously intends for us to recognize that he means inside himself as well. If this film is able to afford such an explicit double entendre, that's because of how truthfully it grapples with the nuances of rehabilitation — with the crooked path these men are meant to walk from sin to salvation, and with the practical realities of returning to a world that may no longer have a place for them in it. Like so many of the people he meets in prison, Mel doesn't think he's worthy of being released. 'There's something broken inside of us,' he writes in one of his letters, and it's easier for him to own that spiritual dysfunction than to risk the heartache of failing to overcome it. That's a big part of the initial reason why Warren takes Mel under his wing: The kid is the perfect candidate to kill the most hated man in prison, whose bounty would be enough to pay off Warren's dire gambling debt. The target's name is Mark Shepard (a slack-jawed Cosmo Jarvis, who continues to be one of the most gifted chameleons in modern cinema), he became a national sensation when he was convicted for the rape and murder of a young girl when he was only 13 years old himself, and — after earning a transfer out of maximum security — he happens to be Mel's new cellmate. What separates Mark from the other two characters in this movie's core triangle is that he's evangelically convinced of his own absolution, to the point that he delivers Pentecostal sermons to the world's most hostile congregation. He even ropes Mel into playing the prayer room keyboard as he preaches. It's a little detail, but also one emblematic of the irreconcilable tension that 'Inside' would rather articulate than resolve; Williams often lingers on the image of Mel sitting focused at the piano, forcing us to guess whether the kid is starting to entertain the possibility of self-deliverance, or whether he's plotting how to stab the man at the pulpit. Of course, Mel's dilemma isn't so black-and-white, especially because offing a 'monster' of Mark's caliber might be the shortest possible route to getting right with God. 'Inside' eventually builds to a clear moment of choice for the sake of its own climax, but the vast majority of this movie is spent complicating its characters' logic rather than framing their choices as some moral binary. Not only do Williams and Jarvis conspire to rescue a mottled innocence from the recesses of Mark's tortured mind (a process that hinges on a truly shocking reveal), but Pearce's layered and wrenchingly humane performance eventually reveals Warren to be the heart of the film. That isn't because Warren evolves from the diabolical manipulator that he seems to be at the start of this story, but rather because we bear witness to how the character reframes himself as his greatest mark. He might tell Mel that breaking their cycles of violence is as foolish as thinking a different song might come on when you replay a tape, but some of his actions suggest otherwise, and the surrogate father role Warren assumes while coaching Mel towards another murder starts to affect the older man after he suffers a disastrous visit with his actual son during a brief furlough ('Babyteeth' breakout Toby Wallace is outstanding in the crucial one-scene role). The Joker-like shot of Warren sticking his head out of a car window on the way back to jail, his beard blasting against his face in the wind, is an unforgettably poignant snapshot of a man who's free from everything but himself. 'Inside' is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams' debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene. There are a few small cheats along the way, but 'Inside' is averse to didacticism and neoliberal heart-softening when it counts, and the power it achieves in the end is inextricable from the honesty with which it's earned. 'Who Am I?' is a mystery that none of these characters may ever be able to solve for themselves, at least not with the certainty of a trivia game on the back of a candy wrapper, but to watch them look for the answers in each other is enough to convince us that the question is always worth asking. 'Inside' screened at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Quiver Distribution will release it in theaters on Friday, June 20. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Doechii Addresses the Los Angeles Protests During Her BET Awards Acceptance Speech
Doechii used her platform in a major way at last night's BET Awards. After stunning on the red carpet in a Miu Miu set and cascading braids, the rapper won the first award of the evening, for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist. At the mic, she took the time to acknowledge the current protests against the ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles. She started off her speech by thanking BET and shouting out her fellow nominees, which included GloRilla, Cardi B, Doja Cat, Latto, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Sexyy Red, and Rapsody, before turning the spotlight elsewhere. 'As much as I'm honored by this award,' she said, 'I do want to address what's happening right now outside of the building.' (The BET Awards took place at L.A.'s Peacock Theater). 'There are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order,' she continued. 'Trump is using military forces to stop a protest. And I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us. What type of government is that?' She ended the speech by reflecting on using her platform. 'I feel it's my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people: for Black people, for Latino people, for Trans people, for the people in Gaza.' Read her full speech below: Hi, everybody. First of all, thank you so much BET. This is my first BET Award, so this means a lot to me. I grew up watching this. I just want to acknowledge all of the girls in my category that work so hard. They're extremely talented and very, very creative. You ladies are amazing. So thank you BET for honoring me with this. But as much as I'm honored by this award, I do want to address what's happening right now outside of the building. There are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order. Trump is using military forces to stop a protest. And I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us. What type of government is that? People are being swept up and torn from their families and I feel it's my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people: for Black people, for Latino people, for Trans people, for the people in Gaza. We all deserve to live in hope and not in fear, and I hope we stand together, my brothers and my sisters, against hate and we protest against it. Thank you, BET. You Might Also Like The 15 Best Organic And Clean Shampoos For Any And All Hair Types 100 Gifts That Are $50 Or Under (And Look Way More Expensive Than They Actually Are)
Elle
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Doechii Addresses the Los Angeles Protests During Her BET Awards Acceptance Speech
Doechii used her platform in a major way at last night's BET Awards. After stunning on the red carpet in a Miu Miu set and cascading braids, the rapper won the first award of the evening, for Best Female Hip-Hop Artist. At the mic, she took the time to acknowledge the current protests against the ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles. She started off her speech by thanking BET and shouting out her fellow nominees, which included GloRilla, Cardi B, Doja Cat, Latto, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Sexyy Red, and Rapsody, before turning the spotlight elsewhere. 'As much as I'm honored by this award,' she said, 'I do want to address what's happening right now outside of the building.' (The BET Awards took place at L.A.'s Peacock Theater). 'There are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order,' she continued. 'Trump is using military forces to stop a protest. And I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us. What type of government is that?' She ended the speech by reflecting on using her platform. 'I feel it's my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people: for Black people, for Latino people, for Trans people, for the people in Gaza.' Read her full speech below:
