By Jeremy Carr. A film more arduous and cumbersome than it is deferential and imaginative.” Aside from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 paragon, The Passion of Joan of Arc, the story of the revered “Maid of Orléans” has been told dozens of times by some of cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers, from […]
Portrait of a Singular Artist – Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts
A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. If the likes of Kubrick or Bergman have more or less been deified, surely she belongs in this secular pantheon.” If, like me, The Criterion Collection and Eclipse Series – through their pristine releases of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), […]
Sugary Serial: Dwight H. Little’s Bloodstone (Arrow Video)
1988’s Bloodstone comes off as pleasingly old-fashioned – fleeting side-boob excepted.” By Rod Lott. After 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark rolled over the competition and into the stratosphere of pop-culture consciousness, dozens of rip-offs followed. Some were imitations; others, parodies – and as far as I know, only Brett Stimely starred […]
Airbnb Done Wrong: The Rental
By Elias Savada. It’s another hung-out-to-dry whodunit…in which you never really learn whodunit.” Will The Rental do more damage to the home sharing business than the Covid-19 virus already has? Probably not, but this cautionary tale – an adequate variant of the Cabin in the Woods horror sub-genre, might cause […]
Ghosts of War Gone Awry
If it feels like Final Destination at war, that’s because Bress was a writer on some of those popular films. By Elias Savada. I was hoping the new film from Eric Bress, his first solo directorial effort after 2004’s lightly entertaining science fiction thriller The Butterfly Effect – which he […]
Temporal and Spatial Movement – Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics, Edited by Louis Bayman and Natália Pinazza
Embrace the Serpent (2015) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Movement, both literal and figurative, is an inherent aspect of cinema: the actors, the camera, and even the filmstrip itself – speeding through a projector – are largely defined by their movements. Perhaps most emblematic of this fundamental quality is […]
Immortality Has Come To This: The Old Guard
“A passable piece of mythology that feigns to be a culturally relevant action flick.” By Elias Savada. A funny thing happened on the way to this movie. It took a second viewing of The Old Guard to figure out it is an ok action flick. On a high-definition 60-inch television, […]
Faces to Remember: They Coulda Been Contenders by Dan Van Neste
Karen Morley, with Osgood Perkins and Paul Muni, in Scarface (1932) A Book Review by Tony Williams. This 2019 book from BearManor Media is a well-compiled series of career surveys and interviews of several screen personalities, some of whom may be familiar to the general viewer, others who have been […]
“My Name is Edna”: Fragmentation, Space and Identity in Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Creswick is a small town of around 3000 people just outside Ballarat, a regional area in the Australian southern state of Victoria. Japanese-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James has solid professional form working in this part of the country; almost a decade ago she posted on Facebook about […]
Aorta Be in Pictures: The Filmmaking Mystery of Gregory Hatanaka and His Latest, Heartbeat
By Rod Lott. If you have run across Gregory Hatanaka’s name, it most likely was affixed to Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance, his well-intentioned, but ill-advised sequel to the legendarily bad 1991 movie he didn’t make. If it’s true you can’t make a cult movie on purpose, that 2015 disappointment […]