Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Patrick Dahl
“Hagiographies are Boring and Annoying” Tom Stern on Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt
The year when Butthole Surfers founders Paul Leary (guitar) and Gibby Haynes (vocals) both turned 69 is the cosmically perfect time for a documentary about a band that elevated scat, sex, and puke jokes to something approaching fine art to be released.
FAST
Potential energy is the prevailing force in Rob Tregenza’s sixth feature, FAST (2026), an entrancingly slow film about an aspiring racecar driver. It’s perversely thrilling to watch a torpedo-shaped, open-wheel performance machine obey the speed limit along narrow smalltown roads. The engine blasts a sense of danger at odds with the sleek body’s serene tour past old brick churches and historical landmarks.
Everyone’s Gone to the Movies
Last summer, the Brooklyn Academy of Music hosted a restoration of No Fear No Die, an early and seldom-screened noir from the French iconoclast Claire Denis. It’s a spare tale of cockfighting and colonialism set at a tawdry truck stop-slash-nightclub outside Paris. J. Hoberman, that living legend of film criticism, celebrated the release for the “Rewind” column at the New York Times.
Wild in the Streets
A more able director than the TV-veteran Barry Shear might have better nurtured the parodic core of Wild in the Streets (1968), but greater tonal cohesion would rob the film of the odd tension that makes it perfect October viewing ahead of yet another most consequential election of our lifetime.
Winter Kills
Like shrapnel from a pipe bomb, the cast and crew of Winter Kills (1979) hurl themselves in a dozen different directions, variously sailing past one another or colliding for brief, brilliant bursts. Jeff Bridges stars in a grounded deep state thriller as an All-American failson uncovering national rot, while John Huston romps around in a screwball comedy as an oligarch tuned to the frequency of underground comix.
Rob Tregenza: Thinking with Cinema
Like many truly independent artists working on the margins and facing shrugs from curators and distributors, Rob Tregenza’s work is more often mentioned than seen. It’s hardly mentioned either, save by a few high-profile champions. He’s been celebrated in print by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Dave Kehr, and more recently by Richard Brody, who named Tregenza’s most recent film, Gavagai, one of the best films of 2018.
1995: The Year the Internet Broke
Please allow 10 working days to process before shipping. In 1995, Hollywood discovered the internet. Amid the rise of web browsers, commercial ISPs, and news of high-profile hacking arrests, a torrent of networked features hit the big screen, including Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, The Net, Ghost in the Shell, Virtuosity, and Strange Days. Much as cinema once valorized the Wild West, it was now pursuing a new kind of Manifest Destiny across the information superhighway at breakneck speed.
Beloved
At the movies, post-war American idealism lives most alluringly in the work of Jonathan Demme. His films modeled how good liberals have always wanted to see themselves: as conscience-led friends of the working class, warriors for social justice, believers in a universal dignity, custodians of the biggest tent. These fantasies have been hollowed out in the theater of politics, but Demme’s work retains its power because it is marked by an unironic, non-transactional conviction in pluralism.
Bigas Luna’s “Passion Trilogy”
In the early 1990s, while Spain settled into EU membership, having finished digesting its post-Franco democratic transition, Catalonian filmmaker Bigas Luna earned international hosannas for a string of films variously referred to as the “Passion Trilogy,” the “Iberian Trilogy,” and the “Iberian Portraits.” Co-written by Cuca Canals, the series represents a slight toning down of the voracious sexual curiosities Luna explored earlier in his career, while furnishing enough graphic combinations...
Alien: Covenant Finds The Sweet Spot Between Brains And Thrills
By combining body horror and existentialism, Ridley Scott's Alien prequel shows more imagination than most contemporary studio films. W ith a single exception, each entry in the Alien franchise boasts the signature of a pop auteur applying his idiosyncratic sensibility to an ever-expanding mythology.
Alien: Covenant Finds The Sweet Spot Between Brains And Thrills
ith a single exception, each entry in the Alien franchise boasts the signature of a pop auteur applying his idiosyncratic sensibility to an ever-expanding mythology. In Alien (1979), Ridley Scott pitted a lone monster against Howard Hawksian blue collars in a weathered mining ship, while James Cameron militarized the battle and multiplied the star beasts for the sequel, Aliens (1986).
Black Jesus
Woody Strode has maybe fifteen lines of dialogue in Black Jesus (1968), his first and only starring role. (Despite playing the title role in pal John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge [1960], he was fourth-billed.) After twenty years in Hollywood, during which he turned in dozens of memorable supporting parts in westerns and jungle adventures, Strode decamped to Europe in the late 1960s in search of better roles and salaries.
Johnny Mnemonic in Black-and-White: Robert Longo Interview
Despite 25 years of dismissal and mockery, Johnny Mnemonic remains a visionary forecast of the networked society. No pre-millennium Hollywood production captured the anxieties and exhaustion of living online so well, despite studio butchery that deprived audiences of writer William Gibson and director Robert Longo’s ambitious vision.
The Films of Miklós Jancsó
How should history be performed? Perhaps not at all in narrative cinema, where historical figures and their deeds are shoehorned into satisfying dramatic packets that flatter contemporary sensibilities before worming their way into American high school curricula. The potency of images obscures the work of both consuming and fashioning the historical record.
Satyricon
Our imagination for the distant past has been atrophied by the movies, which handily suppress museum placards and “10 Things You Don’t Know…” articles that offer up the utter strangeness of ancient modes. Projecting the preoccupations of the current episteme back through the ages puts knots in the historian’s brow, but storytelling’s function is to make sense of things, and its conventions during any given moment bear something close to the force of divine law.
“If I Can Google It, It Doesn’t Belong in My Film.” Jessica Beshir On Faya Dayi
Filmmaker Jessica Beshir will be in attendance this evening at the Maysles Documentary Center’s screening of her feature debut Faya Dayi. This gorgeous song of a film captures the idyllic rhythms and economic anxieties of Ethiopian communities whose economic and social lives revolve around khat, a native plant chewed for its stimulant effects.
DOC NYC 2021
The country’s largest nonfiction film festival, DOC NYC, opens tonight, extending audiences a monthlong invitation to reckon with 21st century humanity across dozens of features and nearly as many shorts. Dive into this wealth of social portraiture and fashion for yourself a personalized, though fairly coherent, image of life in 2021.
Bottled Songs 1-4
As the collective absorption in mass media transitioned from pervasive to absolute in the past fifteen years, the ethics of image consumption have slowly leaked out of the academy into everyday discourse concerning trigger warnings, platforming, and content moderation. The internet is only now realizing some of the promises made in breathless, Clinton-era USA Today features, and we’re struggling through the growing pains as our nervous systems are colonized by infinite stimulation.
Marguerite Duras on Television
“I love Marguerite Duras,” a friend said to me recently, “but at a distance.” The meaning here is never clearer than when watching the writer and filmmaker in her natural habitat, ensconced in cigarette smoke and conversation, lost and aloft in her own erudition.
To and From Myanmar: The Films of Midi Z
Due to 124 years of British occupation and the cumulative meddlings of foreign interests, the once self-sustaining agricultural systems of Myanmar were devastated and replaced by an export-oriented industry that benefited the rich and the few. Today, many Burmese smuggle themselves abroad for better-paying undocumented work to send money to their families back home.
SXSW 2021: Reviews Round-Up
For our first-ever SXSW coverage, Screen Slate’s Cosmo Bjorkenheim and Jon Dieringer are on the virtual scene of the festival's inaugural online edition. What follows is a selection of short capsules of noteworthy narrative and documentary features and shorts that we've seen. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) in Piers Haggard's Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) | Courtesy Severin Films. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched dir.
Nina Menkes On The Process of Discovery
The personification of American independent auteurism, Nina Menkes has stamped every frame of her work with an unmistakable signature that collides inward-gazing dream logic against the violence of painfully real contemporary landscapes.
Darling
A year before Blow-Up blew the lid off London’s mod scene, John Schlesinger’s Darling brought together two of 1965 England’s most intriguing actors — Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde, whose varied work is the subject of a new Criterion Channel collection — for “a powerful and bold motion picture” (as its bright red poster proclaims) about a new lost generation. Christie plays Diana, a fashion model with her eye always on something bigger.
Suddenly
Taking its name from the favorite adverb of lazy writers, Suddenly (Lewis Allen) doesn't necessarily instill confidence with its title — a dubiousness only doubled by the word's flashy stylization, with an exclamation point, on the 1954 film posters. But despite the somewhat obvious crime flick title, Suddenly is much subtler and more rewarding than it initially lets on.
Orders filmmakers Eric Marsh & Andrew Stasiulis on bringing the War on Terror home
In 2017, directors Eric Marsh and Andrew Stasiulis released Orders, a no-budget hallucinatory collision between suburban banality and imperialist war. Dana Reinoos covered the film’s New York premiere for Screen Slate in 2018. Two years later, federal troops in unmarked vehicles are abducting Americans on American streets, making this a fitting time to speak with the directors, whose film, conceived during the first Obama administration, has only gained relevance in the subsequent years.
Béla Tarr and Arbelos Films on Restoring Sátántangó
After twenty-five years of catch-’em-if-you-can 35mm screenings and lackluster DVD releases, Béla Tarr’s titanic Sátántangó, the rare cinematic magnum opus worthy of the designation, is set to become as accessible as can ever be hoped, considering it’s a seven-hour film designed to be consumed in one sitting (with two brief intermissions).
The Innocents | Featured Screening | Screen Slate
Stories of the paranormal usually collapse at the moment they throw viewers a bone. After 90 minutes wondering about a ghost’s motivations or the manner in which it can be killed, we’re treated—or so we think—to an explanation that jibes with our senses of justice and credulity. Films and stories delineate this knowledge as a salve for our existential anxieties. The methods and motivations of paranormal forces become as explicable as those of any fictional character.
Joan the Maid | Featured Screening | Screen Slate
In Jacques Rivette’s diptych retelling of France’s most storied saint, Sandrine Bonnaire astounds as a restless, credibly teenaged Jeanne d’Arc. Together, both films, Joan the Maid: The Battles and Joan the Maid: The Prisons, run over five hours, making the endeavor Rivette’s second longest, trailing only the notorious 13-hour length of Out 1.
The Legend of the Stardust Brothers | Featured Screening | Screen Slate
Audiences and critics neglected would-be wunderkind Macoto Tezka’s 1985 debut, The Legend of the Stardust Brothers, a cosmic injustice rectified only this past year with a festival-touring director’s cut and home video release. Tezka (born Tezuka, son of manga deity Osamu) was a 22-year-old film student with a few shorts to his credit when he adapted composer and TV presenter Haruo Chicada’s parodic concept album for the screen as a musical extravaganza.
Juice
Ernest R. Dickerson’s directorial debut Juice has a neo-noir look and a surplus of documentary detail. It shares the vitality of the early 90s New York hip hop culture it documents, from turntable gear worship to sneaker fetishism. And aided by Tupac Shakur’s searing performance, Juice captures the traumatic and anxious roots of American gangsterism better than just about any other entry in the evergreen genre.
Speed Racer
To date, green screens soundstages have been used primarily to deposit bewildered actors ahead of gelatinous armies marching toward plasticine blue-grey vistas. The results are as hideous as they are lifeless, lulling our eyes into a complacent awe fixated above all on immensity.
“There’s Already So Much There”: Craig Baldwin Punctures the Archive | Screen Slate
Stepping out from an "insane show" unfolding above him in the "multimedia, multilevel, gallery, consortium, collective" he's called home for decades, Bay-area filmmaker/archivist/programmer/educator Craig Baldwin recently spoke with Screen Slate via telephone while packing his kit for a weeklong tour of New York, which will include a retrospective at Metrograph as well as a series of tributes, a curated program and a live performance, all at UnionDocs.
Tall Shadows of the Wind
Ideologically radioactive, Bahman Farmanara’s creeper Tall Shadows of the Wind impressively provoked government censors before as well as after the 1979 Revolution. Truly, how could any state power comfortable wielding a red pen abide such an allegorically-rich conceit: ominous scarecrow erected to protect crops instead terrorizes a small village, instilling reverence, disdain and paranoia. In short, a society crumbles at the feet of a god made in its own image.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Patrick
Contact Patrick, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack