Movie Reviews
'Pavements' review: Far more than just a music documentary
(Credits: Venice Film Festival)
Pavements – Alex Ross Perry
I’ll start with a disclaimer: before I had settled into my cinema seat at the press screening of Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s unorthodox new documentary about Pavement, I’d never really listened to their music. Of course, I’d heard a few songs, I’d heard the band name, but I’d never delved deeper. These things often fall into a trap. Who are music documentaries for? Only for the fans? The whole point of Pavements was to avoid that, so I was sent in as a test.
“For Pavements, I was always trying to not think about the fans because that’s your worst audience,” Alex Ross Perry told Interview. With this new and admittedly odd movie about Pavement, he was doing everything possible not to make a classic fan-focused music documentary because, as a music fan himself, he was sick of it.
“So few bands want to do anything different now. It’s become so flat and uninteresting. Now it’s all about making a valuable piece of marketing,” he complained, not wanting to chain himself to that narrative. It’s something he’s been trying to avoid doing for a while now. As he’s also been working on a Metallica movie for some time, he’s been thinking this one thought a lot: “I want to make a good movie that grapples with a lot of this and isn’t fan service”.
So given that Pavements is purposefully not fan service, I felt fine to go in blind, to see what I’d learn and simply to find if it holds up as a film for someone outside of the band’s world. In short? It does.
Pavements is odd, really odd. It feels like a music documentary made by Nathan Fielder, as I know that if I had access to my phone, I would have quickly been googling, “Is Pavements real?”, “Was Joe Keery scripted in Pavements?”, “Was the Pavement musical real?”
Because it’s a wild web and you’re never quite sure what’s real or not. Not only does the movie tick the box of giving a good and thorough overview of Pavement, letting me leave the cinema now knowing a lot about the band, aware of a general timeline of their career, and with an insight into key moments and an understanding of the players, but it’s so much more than that. It feels like a movie, more so than a documentary, so I’ll call it that. The movie centres on these three points, all happening at the same moment; Alex Ross Perry is creating Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Jukebox Musical, he’s also cast actors who are preparing for their roles in Range Life, a classic biopic of the band, and Pavement, the actual band, are preparing for their actual reunion tour.
It’s a lot, but it’s brilliant. The moments focused on Range Life are genuinely laugh out loud funny, especially the bits showing Joe Keery’s melodramatic journey to becoming Stephen Malkmus, taking the piss out of method actors. There’s a nod towards Austin Butler’s obsessive Elvis transformation as Keery sits stoicly with an accent coach discussing his desire to get a photo of Malkmus’ tongue and later freaking out when he cant stop doing the slurring Stockton, California accent. It’s moments like these that make Pavements a worthwhile movie, totally independent of the band, because it makes it something way bigger.
Obviously, this is a film about Pavement, and it does hinge on real-life footage of the group and always comes back to an investigation into them and their success. But it’s more than that. In fact, I’d say it is a movie about music documentaries as a whole. It’s about music movies, or the way bands’ becomings are mythologised into somewhat of a fictional account, when their art is taken and twisted in that way. That is especially shown in two of the film’s most interesting moments.
The first is merely a gag. At one point, it breaks apart, pauses to show the ‘For Your Consideration’ banner of the movie as a joke about how the Oscars eat music biopics up, layering these fake clips of the fake film with melodramatic piano music as a piss-take of the genre.
The second is a more nuanced critique. After recounting the moment the band were pelted with mud and rocks during a 1995 Lollapalooza show, the screen splits in two. What the audience hears is the scene in Range Life where the band returns to their dressing room and falls into a dramatic depression, once again with some sad music on top as they launch into a heavy conversation about splitting up. But on the other side of the screen, you can see the real-life band joking around. It’s moments like that where Perry shows his focus, and it’s less on the band and more on making things interesting.
“The stories you hear, you know they never add up”: These are the words that appear onscreen at the start of the movie, pulled from the band’s track ‘Frontwards’. As someone who didn’t know the band and so didn’t know the song, that lyric merely became a kind of warning-slash-mission statement for the film. It’s as if Perry is using it to comment on the entire genre of music films, or the entire history of how bands are treated, the way their stories naturally become twisted, dramatised and fictionalised to a degree, over time.
From what I learn from the actual clips of Pavement in the movie, the overwhelming characteristic of the band is just sheer normality. They were a group of utterly normal people just wanting to make music, but found themselves at the centre of a storm of obsession that would never just settle for that. By building such a baffling and interesting nest around them here, bringing in the phoney movie and the wild musical, Perry allows the group to be the most normal part of it. This allows their actual story to be told purely because the entertainment and the drama are elsewhere. Not only is it somewhat genius, it’s also just a lot of fun—even if you’re not a fan.
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1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
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