Contracts
Films by stuntmen-turned-directors invite certain action expectations. That broad umbrella includes the works of Sammo Hung, Chad Stahelski, Sam Hargrave, as well as films such as Eric Jacobus’ Hong...
View ArticleSasquatch Among Wildmen
Long before Leonard Nimoy explored the existence of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster on “In Search of…,” cryptozoological creatures captured the public imagination. Even in the face of inconclusive...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Death House
With Halloween officially in the rear view, those who love mainlining schlocky horror flicks like an IV bag full of splatter and gore still have a healthy hankering for streaming spooky content. So,...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: The Brood
In all its fully formed body-horror glory, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was spawned from the messiest of breakups. Released in 1979, the same year that the similarly themed – but drastically different...
View ArticleThe Climb
What would be a dealbreaker for you in a friendship? The Climb opens as two American friends pant and wheeze on bicycles on a mountainous stretch of French road. Kyle (Kyle Marvin), the goofy one who...
View ArticleEcho Boomers
Echo Boomers is another of those movies about the battle for the integrity of a man’s soul and the overarching question of whether he had a soul in the first place. Co-writer/director Seth Savoy’s film...
View ArticleAmmonite
It’s an unusually rare director who possesses the skill of making the intangible tangible. The quality of the things we see and hear in an audio-visual work of art is manifestly apparent, but what of...
View ArticleDivine Love
Brazilian auteur Gabriel Mascaro locates his latest, Divine Love, in an ill-defined zone between dystopian fiction and illuminated manuscript. Taking place in a 2027 Brazil where Christianity and the...
View ArticleRevisit: Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Francis Ford Coppola entered the 1990s coming off a decade of work that lacked the commercial success and critical adulation of his classic New Hollywood period but which had seen his creative vision...
View ArticleFatman
“There isn’t any spirit of the season anymore—hasn’t been for years.” Can you believe this diatribe against people he knows have been naughty is uttered by the beleaguered Mel Gibson playing a...
View ArticleDreamland
The most wonderful thing about cinema is that films are more than the script: they include the acting, the photography, the costumes, the set design, the blocking, the framing, the sound effects, the...
View ArticleWolfwalkers
The plot of Wolfwalkers will be relatively familiar to fans of what are arguably the two most popular animation studios, both of which have made movies about a supposed mythical/alien threat and the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Nurse Betty Turns 20
Before his shift toward the mainstream with his remakes of The Wicker Man and Death at a Funeral, Neil LaBute was both popular and infamous for ruffling audience feathers. Following the indie and...
View ArticleThe Twentieth Century
Reserve a special place in your heart for films like The Twentieth Century. There are plenty of movies with sincere artistic ambition and plenty that are genuinely well-made, yet too few fulfil both...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: Scanners
With David Cronenberg’s early films largely hinging of bodily infestation and psychic phenomena running rampant, the director’s 1981 film Scanners shifted focus to the peril of a world where mutation...
View ArticleEmbattled
It all comes down to the Big Fight in Embattled, a propulsive but familiar drama about the intersection between family dysfunction and competitive sport. We’ve seen this kind of story before, as two...
View ArticleSound of Metal
Just when you thought it was safe to get back behind a drumkit… Six years after Damien Chazelle’s breakthrough Whiplash, Darius Marder attempts a similar assault on the American indie cinema scene with...
View ArticleVanguard
Let us get the good news about Vanguard out of the way first: Its makers really, really tried to craft a reasonably goofy action extravaganza, complete with set pieces that defy the laws of gravity,...
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Jiu Jitsu
The opening credits of Jiu Jitsu are presented in the form of vibrant comic panels, as if director Dimitri Logothetis is asking the audience to please just view the film as silly heightened fun from...
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Revisit: The Prince of Tides
In 1990, Kevin Costner directed, produced and starred in Dances with Wolves, earning critical admiration and two Oscars. Two years later, Clint Eastwood would also earn an Oscar for Unforgiven, the...
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