By Jeremy Carr. Resurrection moves along at a generally foreboding pace with efficiently intermittent revelations and expository arrangements, largely motivated by Semans’ devious direction, Hall’s multifaceted performance, and the outlandishness of its expectant impetus.” Margaret has it all figured out. She’s successful and in control at work, presiding over her […]
A Subtle Kind of Heroism: From Where They Stood
By Michael Sandlin. From Where They Stood shows that documentary filmmaking – used by the Allies during WWII to bring the true scope of Nazi concentration camp horror into the public eye in the first place – can still shed historically relevant light on the Holocaust eighty-some years later.” Although […]
Fist in the Fire: Wang Yu’s One-Armed Boxer (Arrow Video)
By Thomas Puhr. This ‘plot’ is mostly window dressing for a series of increasingly complicated (and ridiculous) fight sequences. These set pieces are impressively choreographed and shot…boasting the kind of excessive violence similar genre exercises promise yet don’t always deliver.” The good people at Arrow Video may have the market […]
Of Time and the City – Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
By James Slaymaker. But the overarching ambition of Dreaming Walls is to preserve an image of the Chelsea Hotel while there is still some semblance of the creative spirit which one animated it remaining.” Early in Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s elegant, mournful documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea […]
Avoiding Complacent, Selective Angles – Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. Júlia Havas scrutinizes selective applications of feminist analysis and responds with the charge of provoking media studies scholars to scrutinize those who engage in reductive feminist discourse.” Júlia Havas’s new monograph Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) […]
Heaven is Overrated: Luke Boyce’s Revealer
By Thomas Puhr. It didn’t go where I expected it to. And at the end of the day, isn’t that just about one of the best things a movie (especially a horror outing) can have going for it?” Watching Luke Boyce’s Revealer (2022) gave me a much-needed lesson in patience. […]
Half-Baked Cosmic Horror: Rich Ragsdale’s The Long Night
By Thomas Puhr. The Stuart Gordon ingredients are indeed there, though the film which precedes this loving dedication fails to do anything interesting with them.” Rich Ragsdale’s The Long Night (2022) – we learn during its end credits – is dedicated to schlock-master Stuart Gordon. This comparison makes sense: the […]
“An Act of Willful Defiance”: Terence Davies’s Benediction
By Theresa Rodewald. Unconventional and even daring while not appearing to be so.” “I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it,” writes poet Siegfried Sassoon […]
5 Billion Hours: Daisuke Miyazaki’s Videophobia (Kani Releasing)
By Thomas Puhr. Despite some striking imagery and a strong central performance, Videophobia never exceeds a low boil.” Daisuke Miyazaki’s Videophobia (2019) begins with an extended masturbation scene. You’d think such an opener would – at the very least – grab the viewer’s attention, but the sequence somehow lands with […]
A Pompous Pageantry of Moviemaking: Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna
By Jeremy Carr. Doesn’t hold a candle to Gaspar Noé’s best work, though it does represent the worst of his occasionally strained attempts for shock and awe.” With no establishing context and following a few curious quotes and seemingly random clips from early films about witchcraft, Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna […]