Rediscover: Cemetery Man
Inspired equally by the labyrinthine narratives and bizarre psychosexual undercurrents pervading the Italian giallo and the often perverse blend of sex, death, and pitch-black humor found in many 1980s...
View ArticleThe Three Musketeers: Part 1 – D’Artagnan
The endurance of The Three Musketeers is not due to its mix of action, romance and political intrigue. It is because Alexandre Dumas 1844 novel is part of the public domain. There have been countless...
View ArticleA Creature Was Stirring
2023 must have been a nice year to be gifted with so much holiday horror naughtiness; it was only last month that saw Tyler MacIntyre fuse It’s a Wonderful Life with some slasher stabbing. With his...
View ArticleAnselm
The art gallery is a sacred space, or at least it should be. On occasion, the act of viewing art can be quite dull, even misleading. Acquiring a notable or thought-provoking work is one thing, but the...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Thirteen Turns 20
Too often, adolescence is widely misrepresented in coming-of-age films and teen-centered media. Granted, a lot of the canon consists of unrealistically hopeful and somewhat cartoonish films that are...
View ArticleAmerican Fiction
Films like American Fiction are born out of frustration. It’s no secret that many Black narratives at the forefront of American culture, both in literature and film, are based around themes of trauma,...
View ArticleThe Zone of Interest
After the title card reveal, The Zone of Interest lingers on a long period of blackness. In adapting a novel by Martin Amis, writer and director Jonathan Glazer creates an unusual kind of overture....
View ArticleCall Me Dancer
There is no doubt that directors Pip Gilmour and Leslie Shampaine stumbled upon a couple of worthy documentary subjects in Call Me Dancer. The film primarily follows a young man named Manish Chauhan as...
View ArticleWonka
Wonka, despite its new-school fantasy-franchise trappings, has a message much like that of its source material, Roald Dahl’s famously dyspeptic 1964 children’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory....
View ArticleSociety of the Snow
As time marches on, the boundaries of what we consider “distasteful,” societally, shifts and changes. What once was scandalous now feels incredibly quaint, leaving few subjects that still feel like...
View ArticleThe Iron Claw
Generations of the Von Erich family were known as exciting professional wrestlers, and their heyday was decades before long-suffering wrestling fan David Willis went viral for exclaiming, “It’s still...
View ArticleGodard Cinema
Who is the greatest filmmaker of all time? It is a question without an answer, at least not one that avoids endless debate. But one perfectly reasonable solution to the puzzle to is Jean-Luc Godard....
View ArticleMigration
There’s a well-known clip of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone at NYU talking about writing. One of their key pieces of advice is that the beats of a story should be connected through...
View ArticleNight Swim
Backyard swimming pools are not inherently scary. They are well-illuminated, with crystal clear water when they are appropriately maintained, so it is almost impossible for something unknown or...
View ArticleMayhem!
With a varied filmography spanning Frontier(s)‘ grisly New Extremity misery, Hitman’s video game gunplay and The Divide’s apocalyptic survival, French genre filmmaker Xavier Gens is no stranger to...
View ArticleFerrari
Filmmaker Michael Mann is fascinated by the destructive masculinity within his determined protagonists. Whether they’re a professional safecracker, a police detective or black-hat hacker, he...
View ArticleHe Went That Way
What happens in He Went That Way really did happen, more or less, in 1964, when a celebrity animal trainer, accompanied by an ice-skating chimpanzee, offered a ride to a man who had no qualms admitting...
View ArticleRediscover: Long Arm of the Law
There’s a “before 1986” and “after 1986” in Hong Kong action cinema, a sea change brought on guns-blazing via John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. The subgenre of “heroic bloodshed” didn’t start with that...
View ArticleThe Teachers’ Lounge
“Think before you speak” is a common aphorism used to teach children to think about the consequences of the things they say. It’s so simple, and something we’ve heard so often, that it’s easy to take...
View ArticleAll of Us Strangers
2023 was a great year for gay characters in cinema from Ira Sachs’ harrowing Passages to Barry Keoghan’s deliciously demented performance in Saltburn. However, the best film about gay lives is Andrew...
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