The Kids Are Alright isn’t the only film this summer that subtly skewers the suburban upper-middle class by following a seemingly well-adjusted family as they’re thrown into crisis when a shadowy father figure attempts to enter their orbit. Only in the case of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, instead of a sperm donor, Dad is a convicted child molester.

Don’t let Air Doll’s title fool you. Mannequin (1987) or Lars and the Real Girl (2007) this ain’t. This gritty, Tokyo-set fairytale about an inflatable sex doll who comes to life represents a departure on many fronts for director Hirokazu Koreeda, who has become known for such faintly melancholy studies of quiet perseverance as Nobody Knows (2004) and After Life (1998). Despite its fantastic premise and candid eroticism, Air Doll covers similar emotional territory to those older titles, surveying with no less an empathetic eye the fickleness of human connection, the power of adoration, and the loneliness that seems to be a hallmark of urban life.

If John Waters is “the Pope of Trash” (according to the gospel of William S. Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal. The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora’s box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls — all shot in San Francisco — for the series “The Superstars Next Door” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I checked in with Stevenson via email before he boarded his transatlantic flight. Here’s what he had to say about his hatred of television, why film preservationists have it wrong, and the most depraved flick ever made in Denmark. […]

What do women want to watch? With Diane English’s recent unfunny and product placement-filled re-make of The Women hitting theaters last week, Hollywood’s answer, predictably, is more of the same. Thankfully there are curators like Ariella Ben-Dov, whose Madcat Women’s International Film Festival has long provided a platform for fiercely independent and experimental women filmmakers, whose work often refuses to be defined by the label “women filmmaker.” Ben-Dov’s curatorial practice has also made a point of expanding Madcat’s audience beyond already faithful cinephiles. On the eve of the 12th anniversary of Madcat, the only avant-garde women’s film festival in the United States, I spoke with Ben-Dov over the phone from New York, where she’s adjusting to her new position as director of the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History, about expanding the San Francisco-weaned Madcat Festival, the power of watching a film in an audience and the uncanny return of Beverly Hills 90210. […]

My first exposure to Charo was in a high school–era Christmas gift from my parents, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. There she was: strawberry blonde Pebbles hair framing a face that defined pert, a guitar poised scepter-like, and an impressive décolleté shrink-wrapped in enough sequins to cover all of Carnaval. […]

Capping off a whirlwind year of charming audiences from Hawaii to New York on the festival circuit (and walking away with a handful of awards in the process), director Richard Wong and composer/writer/actor H.P. Mendoza’s suburban high school musical dramady Colma: The Musical was finally scooped up for national release by Roadside Pictures. A sort of anti-High School Musical, Colma follows three friends in the flush of their new post-high school freedom, who are also caught in the headlights of their as-yet-uncertain-yet-fast-approaching-futures. Set in the San Francisco suburb of Colma — a suburban necropolis, literally and existentially — Wong and Mendoza’s film refreshingly portrays the limbo of young adulthood without recourse to patronizing sentimentality, while managing to score its vicissitudes to ridiculously catchy indie pop-inflected musical numbers. Longtime friends themselves, Wong and Mendoza diffuse our conversation with same buoyant energy that courses through their film. Whether explaining their shared love of West Side Story, hating on irony or impersonating Norma Desmond, these guys are more than ready for their close ups. […]

Whereas David Lynch at times uses all the excesses of a bad rock video to give form to the dream logic that structures his films, Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul creates quietly evocative reveries. Pierced by moments of sharp humor and unexpected beauty, Apichatpong’s movies are imbued with a sense of openness, a responsive flexibility that allows their course to be redirected by serendipitous forces: a song, memories, folk tales. On the eve of the theatrical premiere of his new Syndromes and a Century, I called him on the phone. […]