Jonathan Demme

An Arkansas farmer stages a one-man war against corrupt land developers who want to evict him and his neighbors from their farms for real estate developments.Read More »

Jonathan Demme’s fantastic concert film of cult music favorite Robyn Hitchcock.

The 1998 Variety review:

The eccentric appeal of Brit singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock gets a nice permanent showcase in Jona-than Demme’s third performance-record feature.

The eccentric appeal of Brit singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock gets a nice permanent showcase in Jona-than Demme’s third performance-record feature. While unlikely to have the same impact as helmer’s two prior such breaks from major studio projects — Talking Heads concert pic “Stop Making Sense” and Spalding Gray monologue “Swimming to Cambodia,” both watersheds for their type — pic should scare up some change in limited release for Orion, then enjoy decent shelf life via rep-house, vid and cable circuits.Read More »

From Allmovie:
A wildly inventive and entertaining comic nightmare from former Roger Corman prodigy Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), this screwball odyssey is a ride to remember. Jeff Daniels plays clean-cut New York bond trader Charlie Driggs, who accepts a ride home from a strange but attractive lower-class woman named Lulu (Melanie Griffith). The sexy Louise Brooks lookalike doesn’t take him home, but shanghais him for a bizarre roadtrip to Virginia that includes kinky bondage sex, destruction of property, and robbery. Things get stranger when Lulu tells Charlie that her real name is Audrey and takes him home to meet her mother, asking him to pose as her husband.Read More »

A fascinating and highly moving documentary by Jonathan Demme about his cousin Robert Castle, whom he hadn’t seen for 30 years when he started making this film. A 60-year-old white Episcopal minister working in Harlem with a multiracial and multidenominational congregation, Castle is a passionately committed community organizer who started out in Jersey City and forged strong links with the Black Panthers and other radical organizations of the 60s and 70s.Read More »