A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Any book or article by Joseph McBride is worth reading, especially in this era of mostly dismal films and an unqualified plethora of ignorant internet film reviewers. The author’s latest book (Columbia UP, 2018) on a director who should be more well-known represents […]
Shifty Business: Pound of Flesh
August 6, 2018
By Alex Brannan. After gaining attention in Lindsay Anderson’s if… (1968), legendary character actor Malcolm McDowell jump-started his career with a pair of films that embellished moral ambiguities as they pertain to a lack of restraint toward debauched sexuality. In the first of these, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971), […]
Casey Wilder Mott on Revis(it)ing A Midsummer Night’s Dream
August 4, 2018
By Tom Ue. Casey Wilder Mott served as Director of Development for Flashlight Films, a boutique film finance company that focuses on early stage investing. At Flashlight, Casey oversaw the development of Clint Eastwood’s film Sully, which starred Tom Hanks. He also worked with Academy Award-winning filmmakers including Ed Zwick, […]
Groundbreaking and Dated: TriBeCa 2018
August 1, 2018
By Michael Miller. The 17th Tribeca Film Festival unspooled April 18 – 29, 2018 across seven venues in Manhattan. The festival celebrates storytelling whether in the form of narrative features, documentary, virtual reality and even retrospective screenings. Here are some of the memorable offerings from this year’s festival. The documentaries at […]
Gothic Grotesque: Aristide Massaccesi’s Death Smiles on a Murderer (Arrow Video)
July 30, 2018
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 […]