By Andrew Montiveo. Such subtlety has become increasingly rare….” Popular culture has long relished the outlaw motorcyclist, and Hollywood embraced the outlaw motorcyclist soon after his postwar emergence, mainly due to a number of displaced veterans returning from WWII. Early exploitation cinema profited from the public hysteria over these latter-day […]
“Why Did Fate Make You a Sinner?”: Victims of Sin (1951, Criterion Collection)
By Jeremy Carr. Its pulp façade encases a genuine, sincere examination of sundry motivations, dilemmas, and outcomes, routinely begging the question stated in one its many songs: ‘Why did fate make you a sinner?’” Victims of Sin, or Víctimas del Pecado, is an aptly titled Mexican melodrama where the concept […]
Connecting to the Illusions – The Flesh of Animation: Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media
A Book Review by William Blick. Despite its jargon-laden density, Sandra Annett offers some new insights and perspective into what is usually a misunderstood genre.” In The Flesh of Animation: Bodily Sensations in Film and Digital Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), Sandra Annett argues that digital media and animation […]
Sometimes They Come Back: Bob Clark’s Deathdream (Blue Underground)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Much more than an interesting time capsule…it’s also a minor horror classic in its own right, one well-deserving of a spot alongside Clark’s superior genre work.” Movies like Bob Clark’s Deathdream (aka Dead of Night, aka The Night Andy Came Home, 1974) operate by blunt-force symbolism. […]
Interdisciplinary “Others”: The Monster Theory Reader
A Book Review by Caroline Joan S. Picart. The edited collection aspires to supply a set of ‘tools’ for researchers and students – that is, common approaches and vocabularies for theorizing monstrosity – and then provides an interdisciplinary selection of important readings theorizing monsters and monstrosity….” The Monster Theory Reader […]
Wartime Routine: Murder Company
By Jeremy Carr. The repeated, formulaic structure, lack of development, and its insistence on by-the-numbers genre touchstones make for what is merely a passable war movie….” Murder Company almost immediately recalls many of the war movies produced during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Not the big budget, star-studded epics, but […]
Twisters: Good Ole Tornado Porn
By Elias Savada. A great Dolbyized and super-sized disaster ride.” Youngsters, let me tell you something. Back a generation or so, in the late 20th century, there was a very popular film called Twister (catch it on MAX), an action trembler with a very sexy Helen Hunt and the late […]
A Family Affair: Patrick Dickinson’s Cottontail (2023)
By Thomas M. Puhr. While occasionally touching and buoyed by across-the-board strong performances…the resulting film is excessively earnest at best, and manipulative at worst.” Patrick Dickinson blends the multigenerational family portrait, fish-out-of-water tale, and couple-grapples-with-Alzheimer’s drama to middling effect in Cottontail (2023). It seems the writer-director figured that if he […]
Collective Creation: Universal Language
By Yun-hua Chen. Universal Language mocks our limited imagination by opening up its limitless possibilities….” “Cinematic Venn diagramme between Winnipeg, Tehran and Montréal”, or “a Hawaiian pizza”, as director Matthew Rankin described his sophomore feature Universal Language (2024) himself – the film is completely unexpected, bold, free-flowingly imaginative, multi-everything and […]
In Love and Pain – Vampires in Silent Cinema by Gary D. Rhodes
A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. A carefully detailed account of the vampire archetype’s journey from literary and folkloric origins to the silent screen….” “Schreck’s peculiarities are like lovemaking games,” so says the fictional F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a vampire film […]