Review

By Ali Moosavi. Taylor Sheridan has written the script for a couple of terrific thrillers recently: Sicario and Hell or High Water. This year he is in Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section as a director with another great noir, Wind River (only his second feature after 2011’s little […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Before you can say “Meryl Streep”, “Mamma Mia”, “Shazam”, in addition to the many superheroes and heroines and recent critical studies, Superheroes on World Screens (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) co-edited by two “Wonder Women” appears. Despite the earlier necessary demolition done by William Klein […]

By Ali Moosavi. Michael Haneke’s new film Happy End played at the Official Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Haneke is a Cannes veteran, having won the Palm d’Or for Amour and The White Ribbon, Best Director for Hidden, and Grand Jury Prize for The Piano Teacher. Happy End […]

By Ali Moosavi. Michel Hazanavicius became a cinema celebrity six years ago at Cannes where The Artist became the sensation of the festival and went on to win several Oscars, including Best Film, Director, and Actor. This year Hazanavicius is back at Cannes, in the Official Competition category with Redoubtable. It […]

By Elias Savada. Grief changes you. It can drive you to do dark and drastic things outside your normal routine. Such aberrations are the creepy core of Irish director Liam Gavin’s moody chamber piece, A Dark Song. This excursion into the realm of magick was influenced by the life and strange […]

By Anthony Uzarowski. Whenever a film gets digitally restored and reissued after a considerable amount of time passes from its initial release, the first question that comes to mind is: is it still relevant? This is especially true of works by renowned filmmakers, auteurs whose artistic voices defined their own time […]

By Christopher Sharrett. I somehow conflate in my mind’s eye images of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort/The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) with images of my experiences of the late Sixties. This seems odd, since these masterworks by Jacques Demy, although fully-accomplished […]

By Elias Savada. Thirty-eight years ago this month, the world experienced a horror like no other. Ridley Scott’s Alien intensely attacked worldwide audiences. No one wanted to swim into the ionosphere. Our species has never been the same. We’ve now survived three sequels and one prequel (2012’s Prometheus) as the man […]

By Tony Williams. With one exception, this new release does live up to the second part of the above caption. Long revered by devotees of horror, science fiction, and its post-war Italian exponents this notable film of a disputed canonical tradition has not been generally available in a good copy […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Despite appearing in an independent press publication, this study deserves neither to be forgotten nor regarded as ephemeral since it represents a very distinctive and well researched contribution to the area of British Cinema. Although this field has been well documented over the past […]