Interview

By Jeremy Carr. The Lodgers is a gothic horror tale set in 1920 Ireland. Directed by Brian O’Malley, it is a stately, tempered take on the traditional haunted house scenario. Centering on orphaned twins Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner), the film picks up as the youth have just turned […]

By Pete Donnelly. Left in the wake of rock and roll’s growing popularity, jazz icons essentially stood as living monuments to their revered era. Without mainstream recognition, many of the “Giants of Jazz” nonetheless continued to make vital music. Sonny Rollins, presented in the Robert Mugge film Saxophone Colossus (1986; named after […]

By Anna Weinstein. Released in May 2017, Early Women Filmmakers: An International Anthology includes nearly eleven hours of material and highlights the work of fourteen groundbreaking women filmmakers, dating back to 1902. This DVD collection offers a historical and critical study of the women who helped to shape cinema. The […]

By Elias Savada. This wasn’t supposed to be an interview. While writing my review of the Blu-Ray of his sole feature The Dismembered, I thought I had met Ralph S. Hirshorn before. Sure he lives in Philadelphia, where I’ve been 3 or 4 times, but it wasn’t there. Looking in […]

By Neila Driss. The Egyptian screenwriter and director Mohamed Diab is a bold filmmaker, unafraid of tackling subjects that are often taboo in the Arab-Muslim world. In his first film, Cairo 678 (2010), he addresses sexual harassment in the Egyptian capital, while in Clash (2016), his second film as director, […]

By Martin Kudláč. Marko Zaror, Chilean-born martial artist known from the films of Robert Rodriguez, stars as the nemesis, Rastingac, to Scott Adkins’s hero Martin Tilman in Jesse V. Johnson’s latest action film, Savage Dog. Tilman, a former champion boxer, fights for wealthy criminals to bet on while he is imprisoned somewhere […]

By Jeremy Carr. Before ever beginning his debut feature film, director Mathieu Ratthe had proven himself adept at two critical techniques. First is a keen ability to manipulate and employ the most effective strategies of the horror genre (proper scares, an unsettling atmosphere, startling twists). Second is to do so with […]

By Gary M. Kramer The lovingly made documentary Saving Brinton, which received its World Premiere at the recent AFI DOCS festival, introduces viewers to Michael Zahs, an Iowa man who found a treasure trove of old films exhibited by Frank and Indiana Brinton in his Washington County basement next to […]

By Jake Rutkowski. Anxiety over parenthood has long been fertile ground for the horror film tradition. Frankenstein (1931), one of the first explicit entries of the genre in film (and literature for that matter), was a real-life Mary Shelley pregnancy nightmare turned fiction classic. Then there’s films like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Omen (1976), […]

By Constantine Frangos. When renowned cartoonist, author, and comics theorist Scott McCloud first suggested the idea of creating a full 24-page comic book within a single day to fellow comics artist Stephen R. Bisette, it was conceived as an exercise to stoke creative agility. More than twenty years later, the […]