“Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”
“How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” —Rachel P. Maines
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid
Crime · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
“The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”
Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
“These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”
Asian · Comedy · Festivals & Awards
“This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication — unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”
Books · Exploitation & Erotica
Ekertoth has dug up a million idle hours of eye-to-the-grindstone page-turning sensation for curious readers, and they’d be doing a disservice to cinema, Sweden, and Satan, to miss it
These kids are aping anime, creating a dead look about their pupils, removing all glimmer of intelligence from their face as if trying to pass as a zombie in a post-Romero school environment, where any glimmer of humanity is met with devouring and slobber.
Books · Exploitation & Erotica
Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle. Albany, Georgia: BearManor Media, 2010. Paperback. $27.95. 458 pp. ISBN 1593936079. David Del Valle collects. Among other things, he[…]
Pre-Code · Reviews · TV & Streaming
TONIGHT at 8 PM on TCM! SAFE IN HELL (1931) a very lurid pre-code in the RAIN tradition, directed by unflinching two-fisted auteur William PUBLIC ENEMY/NIGHT NURSE Wellman. TCM’s Roger[…]
Is Two Seconds (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) the first American noir? I’ve read some historians who trace American film noir as far back as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927). But Underworld,[…]
Boredom never looked so good Psycho boring? What blasphemy! Psycho is unusual for many reasons, but in some ways the most important is the mere fact that it is in black-and-white. By[…]
“The resurrection of Fritz Lang’s original cut has revealed how well this film functions with its associative network of image layered onto an adventure/SF thriller, but the reasons for its mysterious pull coalesce into an x-factor that resists analysis.”
Activist & Political · Essays · New Media
“For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.” —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
“In order to rectify her own misery with judgmental, shrewish wino Annette, Julianne Moore has to suffer the shame of being caught cheating, the way Dick Cheney had to suffer the blame for all the waterboarding we needed to squash terrorism.”
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And Claude Rains.
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
“The wonderful paradox of the Wiseman film is that what allows the layered complexities to unfold is the leveling of everything we are shown.”
