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The best scene in Meet Me In the Bathroom, the excellent new documentary on the rock & roll scene that slouched into New York in the beginning of the 21st century: a parking lot under the Williamsburg Bridge, Brooklyn, Labor Day weekend, 2002. An afternoon punk show, maybe semi-quasi-not-illegal. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing; so are the Liars and Oneida and the Rogers Sisters. The parking lot is packed with kids, crammed onto roofs, balconies, the nearby bridge. Neighbors stare out of apartment windows. I’m down in the crowd. In the footage here,...

Who says faith-based movies can't be fun?

Probably a lot of people, including those who refused to make it, even after scriptwriter, Jim Carroll, won more than 60 awards for his script at various film festivals in 2020 with a film called Assassin 33A.D. That doesn't mean they're right.

Even with all of the accolades, Carroll couldn't sell the film, so he decided to make some changes. I haven't seen Assassin 33 A.D., but from what I understand, Black Easter is a more pithy version that has been edited to appeal to a broader audience.

That makes some sense since this is a Christian, faith-based film. The premise is that a Muslim billionaire named Ahmed hires a group of geniuses to create a time machine so that he can go back into time and kill Jesus for perpetrating one of the biggest scams of all time.

Before you get a chance to say it,...

Stars: Donny Boaz, Morgan Roberts, Isla Levine, Lamar Usher, Gerardo Davila, Jason Castro, Heidi Montag | Written and Directed by Jim Carroll

Written and directed by Jim Carroll, Assassin 33 A.D. takes the basic tenets of the faith film genre (i.e. Christian values) and shoves them into a schlocky, overly violent time travel plot. The result is deeply misguided and comfortably one of the worst films ever made.

After a prologue in which security guard Brandt (Donny Boaz) loses his faith after the death of his wife and daughters in a car crash, the plot centres on a group of science geniuses – including straight-laced team leader Ram Goldstein (Morgan Roberts) and his devoutly Christian colleague-slash-girlfriend Amy (Ilsa Devine) – who accidentally invent time travel while trying to create a matter transporter.

Their joy in their discovery is short-lived, however, because their wealthy boss Ahmed (Gerardo Davila) is secretly a Muslim terrorist...

Seemingly every hot young actor in Hollywood wanted to star in The Basketball Diaries at some point.  The decades-long journey to bring Jim Carroll's gut punch of a memoir to the big screen was finally at the casting crossroads, and it was time to fill the role of the former teen basketball talent, hustler and heroin addict who splashed onto the literary scene chronicling his demons and became a celebrated writer, poet, punk rocker and all-around New York cultural icon unto himself. From Matt Dillon and River Phoenix to Ethan Hawke and Eric Stoltz, the 1980s' freshest faces had all been ready to get dirty at some point over the years. But the years kept going by, and the project...