Movies: Daniel Kremer

Lenny Bruce's depiction on film did not start or end with Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974). Through these other often offbeat cinematic incarnations, this essay piece considers how Lenny Bruce was the perfect Bob Fosse subject, and how Fosse's focus on the l...

An imagined plague diary...

Next Week in Bologna is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Italian Neo-Realism, shot in Rob Nilsson's Direct Action style. A pickpocket cinema projectionist in Bologna, Italy, narrates three intertwining stories of tourists who visit his city one summer. A tim...

A video essay about fifties and early sixties social and sexual mores, in life and in cinema, and how these "codes" (in partnership with a production Code, capital C, which was almost antediluvian in terms of sexual politics) molded and then trapped ...

A young woman named Emily has just arrived in New York from Pittsburgh and has recently changed her name to Chazz. Jobless, she responds to an ad involving parrot-sitting for a Manhattanite going out of town, and must weather the emotional repercussi...

Four interlocking stories with a Jazz theme. Four Women go out to visit the sites of the jazz clubs where Lou, 65 and dying of cancer, claims she once performed as a young singer. It's election night, Nov. 8, 2016 and the women follow the results on ...

Sky-high housing costs, rents no one can pay, urban development, and street crime make life difficult for RV dwellers in Berkeley, California. City bureaucrats collaborate with real estate agents to gentrify neighborhoods forcing out already marginal...

Shot on black-and-white super-16mm, A Trip to Swadades tells the story of a 74-year-old ex-professor named Schweitzer Haas who, after many years of living away from Philadelphia, the city where he came of age, returns to visit his hermit brother Ezra...

Ambitious film students Jim and Laura and their nihilist, restless group of film student friends decide to adapt Macbeth and shoot it with a mostly homeless cast. Jim and his friends search for locations in abandoned buildings in Philadelphia and it'...

Carla Durkow is a filmmaker from Istanbul who screens her latest work, entitled Farewell Mighty Spirit, at a Philadelphia art gallery. Her film-within-a-film details the aftermath of the death of the Grand Poet of Santa Maria, and the reading of his ...

John G. Avildsen has only recently cemented his reputation as the "king of the underdogs," owing to his having directed both Rocky (1976) and The Karate Kid (1984). Within the last decade, a feature-length biographical documentary was released and a ...

For over forty years, both from an international platform as well as from his local pulpit in The Bronx, Rabbi Avi Weiss has been an important voice speaking up against injustice for both Jews and non-Jews. In the documentary, filmmaker Phil Schneide...

Traumatized by his recent divorce, lovelorn Stanley takes off cross country to San Francisco, landing at his enterprising sister Nancy's doorstep. Nancy, who makes counterculture cinema-themed t-shirts, lives in "Camille's Castle," a frozen-in-time l...

In 1968, filmmaker Jules Dassin collaborated with Ruby Dee and civil rights activist Julian Mayfield on Uptight, a "politically radical" film noir about Black revolution, framed against the April 4 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Directo...

During one fateful summer, Richie is forced to deal with his mom's deportation and prepare for his First Holy Communion as a Catholic while living with a caring adoptive family whose young son becomes Richie's closest friend and support....

Two brainy 18-year-olds, recent high-school graduates with fine future prospects, get married and then divorce one year later at age 19. Charles, a tweed-clad "old soul," must reconcile being a teenage divorcee as he attempts to forge a relationship ...

Points on a Space Age explores the recent activity of the remaining members of the influential Sun Ra Arkestra since the passing of its founding member, Sun Ra and examines their current work (in the physical absence of Sun Ra) under the direction of...

Jerry, an ambulance-chasing lawyer (and 8mm film hobbyist), lapses into a deep depression after he is scammed out of his retirement savings. His intense love of W.C. Fields, of whom he does impersonations, and his commitment to both his mixed-up half...

David Cronenberg (the well-known Canadian director's American film-student counterpart) is making an ambitious "neorealist video feature" entitled "Wireless Internet", a didactic horror film about a contagious mind virus. The project gradually morphs...

Eccentric, bored recent widower Si Foster, a self-proclaimed eggplant connoisseur, is lonely. His daughter Sonya was kidnapped two years prior and, for reasons unknown to her, the ransom somehow wound up never being paid. As the Fourth of July approa...