Review

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Part Kim Jong-un’s “the West must fall” fantasy come to life, part right wing wet dream and all around militarist anthem, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen (2013) is an updated riff on John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962; though we’ve already had that in 2004, directed by […]

By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. For his first film since 2007’s Redacted, Brian De Palma returns to his Hitchcockian obsession, this time by way of Alain Corneau. A loose remake of Corneau’s final film, Love Crime (Crime d’amour, 2010), Passion feels very much like a De Palma flick from the ‘80s, with […]

By Cleaver Patterson. In film fantasy farmhouses have always been a popular mode of transportation between our world and that of make-believe. Dorothy used her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s humble home in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to reach a land beyond her wildest dreams, and now the ramshackle […]

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Scientists and mathematicians will never understand artists, and vice versa. This was brought home to me forcefully by David A. Kirby’s book, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), which traces the checkered history of math and science experts in […]

By Morvary Samaré. The Invisible Men, an Israeli film by director Yariv Mozer, was one of the documentaries that screened at this year’s One World Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The film portrays the stories of three gay Palestinians and their struggle to create a tolerable life […]

By Jacob Mertens. In the summer of 2008, the Great Sichuan Earthquake rattled China’s cage and left a death toll of nearly seventy thousand people. Within this massive scope of destruction, the city of Beichan, once home to twenty thousand, was obliterated in a fleeting moment. The earthquake wiped Beichan […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Several films have attempted to revisit Frank L. Baum’s magical land of Oz, since Judy Garland first walked the yellow brick road over seventy years ago. So, considering such efforts as the dubious Michael Jackson / Diana Ross vehicle The Wiz (1978) and a Muppet television version […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Some people seem predestined to play certain roles. Seldom, however, do you find a complete cast so perfectly suited to their parts as that of Stoker (2013), the new gothic thriller from Korean director Park Chan-wook. Holding the unfortunate accolade of being the last work on which […]

By Jacob Mertens. Can images invoking a sense of awe bring a man closer to God? If so, then Ang Lee’s Life of Pi could have rested easily as its titular character raged aloud to an unseen deity, watching as lightning struck the ocean, its light spreading through the water […]

By Cleaver Patterson. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have, during the long and varied history of their annual award ceremony, shown favour towards three things – period drama, films which focus on physically or mentally challenged characters, and a liberal sprinkling of controversial, often divisive, political intrigue. […]