Review

By Jacob Mertens. A stretch of cute neighborhoods with picket fences, green lawns. A traveling carnival filled with trailers and sideshow burnouts. A shack buried out in the forest, surrounded by pine trees and old cars sinking back into nature. Ultimately, it does not matter what you call home, it […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) dispels the widely held assumption that sci-fi extravaganzas are, on the whole, aimed purely at the teenage / geek market. Here, it can be comfortably claimed, is the thinking man’s blockbuster, a film that doesn’t forgo intellect in favour of spectacle. That’s […]

By Jacob Mertens. Many hinge the success and failure of a superhero film on whether villains can entice and excite the audience, or whether heroes can effectively transcend their humanity and conquer the odds. These are irrelevant concerns when placed next to the crucial component of all great action films: […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. This little film makes me happy. It’s not little in subject. It’s not little in heart. As a matter of fact, everything about Whatever Makes You Happy is big but the budget, which was positively miniscule. It’s just that it’s tidy and squared away and neat […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. The Tension Between Being and Nothingness Jean Paul Sartre wouldn’t mind my purloining Being and Nothingness, as Things I Don’t Understand is very much an existentialist treatise, conscious or otherwise. From the ontological notion of absurdity—that is to say that life is absurd because it has […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. “I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of an afterlife.” The Holistic is a film short that stays long in one’s memory. I cannot count how many films I’ve seen devoted to life-after-death, but I can’t recall a single one that presented the idea that some […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Having watched The Lords of Salem (2012) one really has to ask what the point behind such a film is? That’s not to say that every movie has to have some deeper meaning. Indeed some films, particularly horror, are often more entertaining if taken at face value […]

By Cleaver Patterson. They say if something’s not broken, don’t fix it – advice Sam Rami and Bruce Campbell might have been wise to pay more heed to. This week sees both the rerelease on Blu-ray of Evil Dead II (1987), the sequel to their cult schlocker The Evil Dead […]

By Jacob Mertens. As far as rallying cries go, I suppose you can do worse than “spring break forever.” Even so, as Spring Breakers’ enigmatic Alien (James Franco) intones the words over and over, each syllable clawing through the speakers in the character’s arresting drawl, the sentiment becomes more of […]

By Cleaver Patterson. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verse 9, describes succinctly the new Tom Cruise blockbuster. Oblivion (2013), the sci-fi extravaganza written, directed and produced by Joseph Kosinski and based […]