Cannibals All!
Warsaw Film Festival Highlights (plus a few stray thoughts) 1) We Are What We Are – dir. Jorge Michel Grau, Mexico The set-up could come out of an old neorealist[…]
Category: Reviews
For Colored Girls: An Experiment in Melodrama
Always eager to present serious issues, Tyler Perry found a batch in Ntozake Shange’s play For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Before entering filmmaking, Perry[…]
Selling Yourself: Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop
“When Banksy sits in silhouette during his onscreen interviews, we have no proof that it’s really him, nor even that Banksy is a real individual.”
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
UCLA Archive revisits “Cotton Comes to Harlem” and “Shaft”
The UCLA Film & Television Archive’s current series on black cinema of the 1970s has featured guest appearances by a number of actors and other people associated with films on[…]
Comic Side Duo Steps Up in The Social Network
There’s certainly various elements uniting in this confident film. Individually, they don’t seem like much, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Just when Oliver Stone[…]
Dishonored
Dishonored Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1931 Marlene Dietrich and Mata Hari: it sounds so obvious once you say it. It didn’t take long for Josef von Sternberg, to put the[…]
Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire (1953)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKZhzpBl5g4] For years, Stanley Kubrick’s independently financed first feature, Fear and Desire, was a suppressed film, next-to-impossible to see. The man responsible for suppressing it was Kubrick himself, because he[…]
“In Northwest China, You’re on Your Own”: A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop
Cora: Yeah, but where are we headed? Frank: What’s the difference? Anywhere. –The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946 The key to the shifty enterprise of adapting a work like the[…]
The Late Claude Chabrol – Some Personal Favorites
There was something so damned likeable about Claude Chabrol (June 24,1930 – September 12, 2010). He had a remarkable enthusiasm for films and the process of filmmaking which translated into[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
“Machete doesn’t text.”
by RUTH STARKMAN This definitive statement comes from Machete, an ex-Federale played by veteran tough guy, Danny Trejo in the deliciously extreme action gore-fest Machete, which opens nationwide Friday, September[…]
Five Shameless Sci-Fi Oscar Robberies, Spearheaded By Avatar
Riding on the back of nine minutes of unseen footage, the special edition of James Cameron’s pioneering 3-D masterpiece Avatar returns to theaters today (Friday August 27). But billions of[…]
As Above, So Below – World on a Wire and The Thirteenth Floor
A MATRIX OF CONNECTIONS For a long time, I avoided watching The Thirteenth Floor (above) due to the name Roland Emmerich in the credits. Emmerich was responsible in one way[…]
Just Enough of Eat Pray Love
The first time I saw the memoir’s title, I couldn’t escape the association: the concept of “pray” following “eat” was made famous by the late quip-master, Rodney Dangerfield. The line[…]
Russia, Godard, Frankenstein – Era New Horizons 2010
I recently got back from a few days at the Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wrocaw. When I was there, most of the excitement centered on Xavier Beauvois’ Of[…]
The Real Villain of John Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939)
STAGECOACH (1939) directed by John Ford from a screenplay by Dudley Nichols is generally considered to be the first adult Western – adult in the sense that it took a set of archetypes[…]
“The Story of a Guy Who Wants to Kill a Guy Who Wants to Die”: Claude Chabrol’s Bellamy
“The good news from Bellamy is that Depardieu gives one of his best performances in years.”
Atom Egoyan’s Chloe: Sex Cinema High and Low
“It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it.”
Class Dismissed: Laurent Cantet and François Bégaudeau’s The Class (2008)
“While a teen’s emotional landscape can indeed defy reason, the filmmakers insist that a teenager’s need to attack supersedes any moral dilemma, even if their behavior results in the expulsion of one of their peers.”
The Energy of an Era: Revisiting Ken Russell’s The Devils
“How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?”
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Hitchcock’s Shadow: On Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take
“The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself.”
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