By Danny King. In the press notes for Grand Piano, director Eugenio Mira states the following: “Having been raised by wolves like Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Brian De Palma and the Master of Masters Sir Alfred Hitchcock, when I first heard of Grand Piano’s premise, the feral infant film-geek in […]
The Spartans Meet The Muppets, or 300: Rise of an Empire
March 18, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It would be a mistake to dismiss director Noam Murro’s sword and sandal “historical” pageant 300: Rise of an Empire (2014) entirely, if only because mainstream pop culture films can often tell us more about the times we live in than so-called “quality” films, since they […]
The Selfish Giant: Greetings from History
March 10, 2014
By Axel Andersson. Oscar Wilde’s tale about the selfish giant who built a high wall around his garden can be thought about as a story in which all directions meet, the up and down of transcendental rewards and punishments and the side to side of earthly goings-on. A giant returns […]
God’s Little Acre (1958)
March 6, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. When he wasn’t genre hopping from Film Noir to Westerns to epic spectacles and war films, the perpetually underrated Anthony Mann was mixing conventions and mingling styles amongst more indefinable works. These were films like Reign of Terror (1949), The Tall Target (1951), Serenade (1956), and, perhaps […]
Gravity (2013)
February 25, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) drifts in zero gravity, curled into a fetal pose with eyes closed, as if the decompression chamber was a womb. She has withstood an onslaught of space debris that wiped out her fellow astronauts and as she hovers above the ground, sunlight […]
Les Cousins (1959)
February 21, 2014
By Christopher Neilan. In 1958, twenty-seven year old cahiers du cinema critic Claude Chabrol spent his wife’s inheritance money shooting his debut feature Le beau Serge, a Hitchcock influenced morality piece starring Gérard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy. The film, which earned the best director prize from the Locarno film festival, […]
Autumn Sonata (1978)
February 15, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. “A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). More than any other line of dialogue, in what is a remarkably written film, this gets to the […]
Shackled (Belenggu): A Well-Mounted Disappointment
February 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I wish I could say kinder things about this film, especially since it’s clear that this was a labor of love on the part of its director, Upi Avianto, an Indonesian genre filmmaker with numerous other films to her credit, such as Looking For Love in […]
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
February 7, 2014
By William Repass. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street begins with a simple equation: money is a drug. “Enough of this shit will make you invincible,” enthuses Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he leans in to snort a line of coke in extreme close-up, “you’ll be able to conquer the […]
Hollywood Exiles in Europe
February 3, 2014
A Book Review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Let’s just start by saying that this is an excellent book. I get stacks of new titles every day from publishers, and it takes a lot for a book to really jump out of the pile and interest me, particularly on a topic […]