NYT Critic Recommends

Starting off with Michael Jackson's iconic Pepsi commercial, this full 3 hour special of Night Flight from 1984 truly has it all with a top ten video pick featuring Dead or Alive, The Cars and George Kranz and an excellent Radio 1990 clip with a Van Halen profile and interview. We finish with a cult classics section of UBU, Space Cadet, Santana and Stephen Stills' Manassas

John Heyn and Jeff Krulik filmed Judas Priest fans in a concert arena parking lot in suburban Maryland. Thirty years later, Heavy Metal Parking Lot is hailed as one the greatest rock documentaries ever. It’s a definitive cultural touchstone for the 1980s metal scene: spandex, big hair, denim, mullets, muscle cars, and beer. Heavy Metal Parking Lot launched a ...Read More

Director Toshio Matsumoto’s shattering, kaleidoscopic masterpiece is one of the most subversive and intoxicating films of the late 1960s: a headlong dive into a dazzling, unseen Tokyo night-world of drag queen bars and fabulous divas, fueled by booze, drugs, fuzz guitars, performance art and black mascara. No less than Stanley Kubrick cited the film as a direct infl...Read More

In what remains the most obscure, bizarre and wildly misunderstood film of her entire career – and perhaps even ‘70s Italian cinema – Elizabeth Taylor stars as a disturbed woman who arrives in Rome to find a city fragmented by autocratic law, leftist violence and her own increasingly unhinged mission to find the most dangerous liaison of all. Academy Award nominee I...Read More

The first 10% of this show sums up what we don't get on TV anymore. Technical difficulties. TV Party was live and improvised, and this meant casual disaster. This early episode gets off to an artistically agonizing start--the sound person is late, overdosing on drugs or both. Or it was the broken down equipment. Once the sound kicks in the show gets lively. Compton ...Read More