“Daredevils of the Red Circle and Other Cliffhangers” is a blog on serials by Geoffrey Mayer, the author of Encyclopedia of American Film Serials (McFarland, 2017). The Good Lord really made this place [Lone Pine] for movies. There’s everything there. There’s sand, there’s rivers, its made for motion pictures. – Budd Boetticher Lone Pine, or more […]
Super Heroes Matter – Avengers: Endgame
April 24, 2019
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 […]
Scared Stiff: Ghost of No Chance
April 23, 2019
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 […]
Surveying Shorts in 2019: A Interview with Sharon Badal (Tribeca Film Festival)
April 22, 2019
By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival had more than 5,100 submissions for its shorts programs. With help from an international programming team, curator Sharon Badal has compiled 11 shorts programs with various themes from the annual New York shorts program – this year’s entry, Streetwise is […]
Dickinson Unbowdlerized: Wild Nights with Emily
April 19, 2019
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 […]
Film Scratches: Broadcast from Oblivion – .TV (2017)
April 18, 2019
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. In .TV, a 22 minute experimental video by Austrian-born, New York based artist G. Anthony Svatek, he uses highly imaginative narrative […]
Film Scratches: The Map and the Territory – Seemingly Uncorrelated Variables (2017)
April 18, 2019
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Dimitrije Martinovic is a Serbian-born, Canadian artist. In his 6 minute short Seemingly Uncorrelated Variables, he presents an idea which is […]
Beyond the Distractions: The Brink
Michael Sandlin
April 17, 2019
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 […]
Never the Victim: Louise Brooks and The Chaperone
Thomas Gladysz.
April 16, 2019
By Thomas Gladysz. The Chaperone, the first theatrical release from PBS Masterpiece, is a story of beginnings as well as a kind of origin story. Its plot revolves around the summer the 16-year-old Louise Brooks (Haley Lu Richardson) – four years before she found fame as a film star – […]
Knife+Heart: Of Felonies and Fellatio
April 15, 2019
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 […]