Email Author Jim Ridley

Awards

• 2006 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published March 24, 2005

  "Blown Opportunity"

• 2006 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published May 19, 2005

  "Lost in the Stars"

• 2006 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published September 1, 2005

  "Pulling Punch Lines"

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2008 Stories by Jim Ridley

• The Sound of One Audience Member Clapping

  published December 24, 2008

  Michael Jacobs, a filmmaker based in San Francisco, is the director of a movie called Audience of One. It's a documentary about a... More >>

• Our critics name the best films of 2008

  published December 24, 2008

  Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Something in the water? Or is it just the way the wind is blowing? Whatever the case, when our... More >>

• Timecrimes

  published December 10, 2008

  Less a mindfuck on the level of 2004’s ingenious Primer than a sort of mental canoodle, this modestly diverting slice of shoestring... More >>

• The Exiles

  published November 26, 2008

  For the length of Kent MacKenzie's rediscovered 1961 feature, the past is not distant: It's vital, concrete, immediate—a record of vanished... More >>

• In Deep

  published November 19, 2008

  By following Scott and Kimberly Roberts, a couple from New Orleans' stricken Ninth Ward, through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, directors... More >>

• I Can't Think Straight

  published November 19, 2008

  Fall asleep flipping channels between Oxygen, Here!, and Lifetime, and you’re likely to find Shamim Sarif’s slickly innocuous lesbian... More >>

• High Wire Act

  published October 15, 2008

  Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center -- that twin-pronged erection jutting from the loins... More >>

• A Wiry Guy

  published September 17, 2008

  Part caper movie, part real-life superhero saga, and entirely engrossing, James Marsh's documentary recounts in Rififi-like detail how a Parisian... More >>

• Brokeback Mohammed

  published August 20, 2008

  Muslims, Jews, and Christians may have their, oh, occasional differences, but as an Islamic scholar observes in Parvez Sharma’s documentary... More >>

• Towering Cinema

  published August 6, 2008

  Even as the first girders were laid in the mid-1960s, something about the World Trade Center — that twin-pronged erection jutting from... More >>

• Soul and the City

  published July 30, 2008

  "The old people remember the past," a narrator says early in The Exiles over a prologue of Edward S. Curtis photographs — faces of... More >>

• Kabluey

  published July 30, 2008

  From the film appearances of the San Diego Chicken to the penguin-suited thug who gave Jean-Claude Van Damme a flipper-smacking in Sudden... More >>

• Kabluey

  published July 23, 2008

  From the film appearances of the San Diego Chicken to the penguin-suited thug who gave Jean-Claude Van Damme a flipper-smacking in Sudden... More >>

• Beyond Gonzo

  published July 2, 2008

  "In a nation of frightened dullards, there is always a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome." So... More >>

• Violence Is Golden

  published June 25, 2008

  Of the summer's many revenge-of-the-nerd fulfillment fantasies — from The Incredible Hulk all the way down the megaplex food chain... More >>

• Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

  published June 25, 2008

  A tightly wound bundle of everything and its opposite—an anti-authoritarian who ran for sheriff of Aspen, a peace-loving gun nut, an... More >>

• Empire Strikes Back

  published June 18, 2008

  You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance, and bloody vengeance? Here's a brawny... More >>

• One Bad Mother

  published June 18, 2008

  A topsy-turvy Escherland exists where Dario Argento's The Mother of Tears is considered a twisted classic, and it is a magical place. Up... More >>

• Savage Grace

  published June 18, 2008

  Designed more for train-wreck gawkery than psychological illumination, Tom Kalin’s garish melodrama applies icehouse style to hothouse... More >>

• The Wrath of Khan

  published June 11, 2008

  You want a history lesson? Take a class. You want clanging swords, sneering villains, storybook romance, and bloody vengeance?... More >>

• The Way You Make Me Feel

  published May 21, 2008

  A man in a Michael Jackson outfit — red shirt, black jeans, white face mask — rides hunched over the tiny frame of a clown bike.... More >>

• The Terrible Infant Speaks

  published May 21, 2008

  The snapshot, smudged with soot, shows a man with a puzzled expression propped up in a hospital bed. He is clearly a patient of some kind. The... More >>

• New Blood

  published May 7, 2008

  No adult has ever been able to codify what separates a good movie from a classic. In kid terms, though — those favored by Son of... More >>

• New Blood

  published May 7, 2008

  In the 1980s, three Mississippi 12-year-olds famously spent six years filming a shot-for-shot VHS remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The... More >>

• Worth the Gamble

  published April 2, 2008

  For pure cinema, nothing rivals a high-stakes, full-tilt poker game — unless it's somebody landing on Ventnor Avenue with two houses, or... More >>