Review

By John Duncan Talbird. Since 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio), time-lapse photography has become a convention, sometimes to the point of cliché. Still, we’re stunned every now and then by its beautiful use as in the opening and closing of flowers to the tune of The Turtles’s “Happy Together” (1967) in […]

A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. James Gracey’s Devil’s Advocates entry on The Company of Wolves (Auteur Publishing, 2017) does everything a book of its scope should do. In about 120 pages, Gracey takes what is a generally regarded cult classic of some distinction and expounds with care and concision […]

By Alex Brannan. After gaining attention in Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968), legendary character actor Malcolm McDowell­ jump-started his career with a pair of films that embellished moral ambiguities as they pertain to a lack of restraint toward debauched sexuality. In the first of these, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971), […]

By Jeremy Carr. Highlighting the Arrow Video Blu-ray of Death Smiles on a Murderer (also known as Death Smiled at Murder) is a video essay by Kat Ellinger. In this roughly twenty-minute supplement, “Taboo: Sex, Death and Transgression,” Ellinger considers, as much as time permits, the nearly 200 films directed by […]

By Janine Gericke. Xavier Legrand’s Custody (Jusqu’à La Garde) is a child-custody thriller. And, the word “thriller” doesn’t usually come to mind when thinking about custody battles. But, that’s just what this film is, a slow burn thriller with a hint of Night of the Hunter and a dash of The Shining. […]

By Elias Savada. A piece of the infamous “Gooble Gobble” carnival communal wedding chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) isn’t the only ditty from that horror classic paid homage to in Aaron Schimberg’s wicked movie-within-a-horror-movie, social satire Chained for Life, which world premiered recently at BAMcinemaFest. In fact, performers emit the […]

By Thomas Puhr. Is the pen indeed mightier than the sword, as Bulwer-Lytton’s adage would have us believe? This ever-prescient question drives writer-director Nicolas Pariser’s 2015 feature debut, The Great Game (Le grand jeu; now on DVD from Icarus Films). At the film’s start, disillusioned French novelist Pierre Blum (Melvil Poupaud) […]

A Book Review by Alex Brannan. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Carol J. Clover takes a critical look at horror and exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s that were written off by most other critics as a trashy B-movie affair. The allusion to Clover’s most famous contribution to horror […]

By Christopher Sharrett. One would think that the fascination with apocalypse in cinema peaked, perhaps, in the late 70s-early 80s, with the disaster films of the era, or the Mad Max cycle, and Blade Runner and its knock-offs. Alternately, Robin Wood remarked that genre cinema reached its “apocalypse phase” in the late […]

By Alex Brannan. “Be in bed by midnight’s bell. Never let a stranger through your door. Never leave each other all alone.” These are the rules that define the lives of twin siblings Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) in Brian O’Malley’s period horror The Lodgers. Orphaned after the tragic […]