Review

By Thomas Puhr. He is a slight man: short and hunched, as if perpetually carrying a heavy load. His head and eyes constantly dart around, almost bug-like. Only when with his dogs, or spending a few days with his estranged daughter, does he seem slightly less on edge. This unease […]

By Elias Savada. Never has a Penny Lane film been this funny. An academic-now-turned-full-professional-documentary-filmmaker, she has provided a window into the weird and wonderful for the last half-dozen or so years with her handful of features and several compelling shorts. She loves to take unusual relics of our planet and […]

By Elias Savada. It has come to this, the emotional end of the Marvel Comic Universe as we know it. In our real world, mankind has been gifted with 22 movies featuring (mostly) beloved characters. The magnificently collected groups of superheroes (Black Panther and Captain Marvel being among the latest […]

By Rod Lott. New on Blu-ray from Arrow Video, 1987’s Scared Stiff arrives with a stunningly inaccurate title – one that suggests a light comic romp, thanks to two earlier Hollywood pictures bearing that name, the more notable being a 1953 pairing of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. But Andrew Stevens and […]

By Elizabeth Toohey. Biopics, especially literary ones, tend to gravitate towards the grandiose. Sweeping vistas and luxurious estates command center stage as a setting for glamorous historical figures cloaked in elegant costumes whose lives appear a tumultuous series of clandestine love affairs, artistic ambitions, and untimely deaths. These period pieces, in […]

By Michael Sandlin. Seeing populist political shyster Steve Bannon’s slow professional demise play out over the course of Alison Klayman’s documentary The Brink might be pitiable if Bannon was just your average morally bankrupt politico. But Bannon is not exactly a sympathetic figure, especially considering he proved to be too […]

By Rod Lott. Whereas several of Brian De Palma’s works famously suggested tools and utensils as phallic, Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart removes all doubt. Right from scene one of his giallo-influenced LGBTQ arthouse thriller, young and able-bodied men succumb to the fatal thrusts of a serial killer’s knife whose blade is concealed […]

By Yun-hua Chen. Action itself is not enough to compose a good action film – we see yet another hard-earned lesson in Master Z: Ip Man Legacy. Directed by Woo-Ping Yuen, the famous Hong Kong action choreographer, and produced by the same producers of Ip Man 1, 2, 3, 4, […]

By Gary M. Kramer. Stockholm, written and directed by Robert Budreau, recounts the “absurd but true” 1973 Norrmalmstorg (Kreditbanken) robbery and hostage crisis that introduced the “Stockholm Syndrome” – the condition where a hostage bonds with their captor. This peculiar crime drama starts out rocky, but then manages to exert a […]

By Rod Lott. If the first two minutes of Riccardo Freda’s The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) had failed to grab me, the next two of this 1971 giallo certainly would. Indoors at night, a beautiful woman suddenly becomes the opposite as acid is thrown in her face […]