By William Repass. “You think they pay you to drive? They pay you to be terrified. That’s your division of labor.” –The Wages of Fear (1953) Let’s not overlook the attendant division, that of leisure. Supposing, for example, you’d rather pay to be terrified. In that case look no further than […]
Finding Fault with The Fault In Our Stars
July 7, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. A month or so back, Slate posted an article in anticipation of Josh Boone’s film The Fault In Our Stars¹—based on John Green’s popular Young Adult book by the same name—in which author Ruth Graham used the timeliness of this release to shame adults about reading YA […]
Life As He Saw It
July 4, 2014
By Paul Risker. There is the frequently re-iterated question of what is the value of a life. The cinematic equivalent is the time given to telling a person’s life story. When you consider the time one expends personally and professionally, and in the case of former Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger […]
Seeing Your Doppelganger Can Only Spell Trouble: Enemy (2013)
July 3, 2014
By Janine Gericke. Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy opens with a quote from José Saramago’s novel The Double, which Enemy is loosely based on, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” Well, that peaked my interest. College history professor, Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads a normal, yet fairly mundane, life. He spends his days […]
The Good Neighbour (2013)
July 1, 2014
By Sam Littman. Not one element of Astrid Schau-Larsen’s documentary The Good Neighbour is superfluous. For this and many tangential reasons alone it is appreciable; the 58-minute investigative effort principally concerned with relaying information and opinions as concisely as possible is satisfied with its borderline feature-length running time, sustains an acute focus […]
Cinema that Goes to Eleven: Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s Heavy Metal Movies (2014)
June 27, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Let all metalheads throw up their devilhorns in celebration—Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s blood-soaked, guitar-churning anthology Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos, & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! is finally here, arriving from the hellish depths of […]
Weekend: Goodbye to Language 2D
June 24, 2014
By James Knight. Joint recipient of the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival was Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language 3D. Godard’s latest effort has been compared to a collage or a mosaic, and described as a freewheeling explosion of colours, sounds and cinematic politics. But simply, Goodbye to […]
Uwantme2killhim? (2013)
By Robert Kenneth Dator. The upshot of what some teens would call a relationship in a world of cyberslaves sees rachel_angel83 (Jaime Winstone) and Mark87 (Jamie Blackely) carry an online relationship to devastating ends. But don’t try to figure out what will happen and who might be to blame because […]
Birth of the Living Dead (2013)
June 19, 2014
By Cleaver Patterson. Film documentaries are the cinematic equivalent of a written biography. As a result, it follows that those which include input from actual people involved with the subject, will take on something of an autobiographical tone. Such is the case with Birth of the Living Dead, which charts […]
Living Stars (2014)
June 17, 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. One of the highlights of Awesomefest’s summer line up is the free July 3 screening of the irresistible documentary, Living Stars, at 9:00 pm at Clark Park , 4398 Chester Ave, in Philadelphia. This infectious, plotless film is an hour-long assemblage (by directors Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat) […]