Review

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 […]

By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible opens with a title card reminding us of the tsunami of December 2004 and of its 230,000 victims, followed by the announcement that the film is based on true events. Then the text fades away until all that’s left are the words […]

By Cleaver Patterson. There was a time when the inclusion of 3D in a film title suggested a degree of novel originality. Unfortunately those days are long past with the process now used in horror films to produce little more than substandard cliché shocks, beggaring the question why Texas Chainsaw […]

By Cleaver Patterson. It’s here! After a nine year hiatus in director Peter Jackson’s continuing cinematic visualization of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epics chronicling the adventures of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), starring Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman has eventually arrived. The big question is was […]

By Jacob Mertens. In history classes, we follow the path of society from one war to the next, from one tragedy to another. Slavery and a civil war bleed into the Holocaust and the assassination of JFK, and so on. Eventually we come to rest on a current climate of […]

By Robert Kenneth Dator. The title of this review, lifted from the publicity tagline, assumes the pitch of a midway barker outside the hoochie-coo tent at a wheat belt carnival. “See for yourself! She teases the imagination; he prods the curious, which is everyone, little lady, to take a peek! […]

By Jacob Mertens. In a town buried in the jungles of Grenada, there stands a small cocoa production facility. Inside, Mott Green tinkers with equipment in a frenetic way that recalls the image of a mad scientist bringing some creation to life. However, what Green brings to life is cocoa. […]