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 […]
A Child Custody Thriller
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. […]
A True Beauty: Chained for Life
July 26, 2018
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 […]
The Epitome of Cool: The Films of Ray Danton by Joseph Fusco
July 25, 2018
A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. I initially saw this 2010 book as a main feature on this company’s web site and requested a review copy, thinking it was a new release. Though mistaken, I not only think this book is still worth reviewing but write this in the hope that […]
Political and Literary Exile: Nicolas Pariser’s The Great Game
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) […]
Forgotten “Final Girls”: The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle by Alexandra West
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 […]
Film Scratches: To See is To Know – saVer (2015)
July 23, 2018
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 saVer, an eight minute stop motion animation by Simon Gerbaud, a French artist who lives in Mexico, the artist reveals […]
Film Scratches: Grist for his Visual Mill – Parva Sed Apta Mihi (2012)
July 23, 2018
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. The footage which forms the basis of Parva Sed Apta Mihi, Walter Ungerer’s 17-minute experimental short, was casually recorded by the […]
Film Scratches: Looking Inward – Green Eye (2012)
July 23, 2018
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. Green Eye is a beguiling seven minute abstraction by Walter Ungerer. It does indeed begin with a green eye, and the […]
The First Purge: State of the Nation
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 […]