By Elias Savada. Kong: Skull Island, Hollywood’s latest outing for its furry Eighth Wonder of the World, has arrived in an energetic, well-mounted, 3-D, IMAX-sized package. King Kong (1933), the species’ black-and-white, ground-breaking original, still reigns as the best big ape/deity movie ever. The new reboot of the monster, despite a somewhat […]
Well-Wrought and Old-Fashioned: Robin Wood’s The Apu Trilogy (New Edition)
March 10, 2017
A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. The film critic Robin Wood (1931-2009) was one of those writers who helped the general public to take cinema seriously as an art form and who, like many critics of the sixties – at least the ones who didn’t become filmmakers themselves – would […]
Ready, Ink, Go!: 24 Hour Comic
By Elias Savada. Ever wonder what it’s like to spend a long day in the life with a comic book artist? Or maybe eight of them? Dream no more, as 24 Hour Comic offers an interesting look inside the creative minds of some of the disposable/collectible medium’s brightest architects, when […]
Get Out: Belated Misjudgments
By Christopher Sharrett. I was curious about Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. I heard rumors that it was a riposte to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), that bizarre mistake by the good-hearted Stanley Kramer, where a young white woman (Katharine Houghton) takes her black fiancé (Sidney Poitier) home to […]
Just Do It!: Get Out
February 24, 2017
By Elias Savada. You don’t need to be creative when making a low budget horror film. They can suck, yet are usually profitable with just a video-on-demand deal. Getting an on-the-cheap scary picture to register positively in the public’s mind is another story. I definitely get the feeling that Blumhouse, the […]
A Big Crumble: The Great Wall
By Elias Savada. So, let’s get to the big question you’re asking your mirror. Is Matt Damon’s new fantasy action movie the greatest wall of them all? Well, for big screen entertainment, including those of you who like this sort of FX-driven, over-stylized, popcorn munching diversion, The Great Wall is […]
Condition: Cloudy – A Patch of Fog
February 15, 2017
By Elias Savada. Irish director Michael Lennox has been to the Oscars – for his 2014 film Boogaloo and Graham, a heartwarming comedy short. It lost, but at least people (well, Academy voters) saw it. Now, Lennox has gone over to the dark side with his feature debut, A Patch of […]
The Passion of James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro
February 13, 2017
By John Duncan Talbird. On the police brutality episode of ABC’s sitcom Black-ish, the teenaged son, Junior (Marcus Scribner), reads out loud from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me (2015). His father, Dre (Anthony Anderson), derisively responds, “Malcolm X said the same thing fifty years ago.” Dre’s father (Laurence Fishburne) […]
Family and Transition: This is Everything – Gigi Gorgeous
By Kate Hearst. Over the course of forty-plus years, Barbara Kopple has made her documentaries with one focus: to be truthful to the voices of her subjects, whether they are coal miners or country singers. In her new film, This is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous, Kopple crafts a heart-gripping narrative capturing the […]
The Heart of Fuller’s Marauders: Film is Like a Battleground – Samuel Fuller’s War Movies by Marsha Gordon
February 7, 2017
A Book Review by Tony Williams. During his lifetime, Samuel Fuller was fortunate enough to receive acclaim from monographs and articles dedicated to his films as well as continue working for as long as possible in film, unlike Buster Keaton and Douglas Sirk. Regardless of championship by Cahiers du Cinema, the […]