Review

By Jacob Mertens. A woman sits on her living room floor, lips parched, transcribing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden by hand. Each time she finishes a page, she folds the paper into a loop on a paper chain and takes a sip of water. Lately, she shares her house with a […]

By Jacob Mertens. For those who love film, there will always be seminal viewings that helped foster that love. And I do not mean watching classics on Blu-Ray or DVD, or even cassette tape, digesting the film long after its vibrant beginnings. I mean seeing a film in its theatrical […]

By Jacob Mertens. Allow me to begin this review with a truism: life is complicated. We are born and we die, and everything we build within that span of time grows lonely with our passing. Without ever being a religious man, I have always held the utmost respect for the […]

  By Jacob Mertens. Several hired thugs stand idle in a parlor holding shotguns and revolvers, while two gentlemen put the final touches on a bill of sale for a slave girl in the adjoining library. The civility they maintain stands in stark contrast to the brooding men waiting just […]

By Cleaver Patterson. Just when you’d given up hope of ever feeling discomfort in the cinema again, along comes something which reaffirms your faith in the art of tense and edgy film. The Dutch thriller Claustrofobia (2011) is one such exercise. The debut from director Bobby Boermans, starring Carolien Spoor, […]

By Cleaver Patterson. The acting profession is littered with the half forgotten careers of stars who, in order to escape the roles which made their names (often in some child-friendly blockbuster), take on shocking or controversial parts to prove that they aren’t just a one trick (or one franchise) pony. Some like […]

By Cleaver Patterson. By the mid 1950’s Ealing Studios, that great purveyor of British cinematic whimsy, was running out of steam. Though this period saw them release such iconic titles as The Ladykillers (1955), their heyday of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s in terms of output (between 1936 and […]

By Cleaver Patterson. In these days of run-of-the-mill schlockfests it appears Southern Europe is fast becoming the place to go for cutting edge horror. Hollywood seems stuck in the belief that the teenage slasher genre is still alive and well, whilst Britain thinks that featuring television comics such as Ross […]

By Matthew Sorrento. Gangster Squad begins with Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), the King of Los Angeles, showing a different kind of power, as he boxes while another character describes him in voice over. Even casual viewers of recent crime films recognize the voice to be Josh Brolin’s, playing an L.A. […]

By Mark James. Throughout the 90s, Belgian filmmaker Bavo Defurne showcased his highly stylized sensibility in a series of queer-infused shorts that reflected overt influences from Derek Jarman, Pierre et Gilles and Jean Genet. He explored timeless queer topics: teenage love, compartmentalizing complex emotions, and fetishizing the unattainable. With his […]