By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible opens with a title card reminding us of the tsunami of December 2004 and of its 230,000 victims, followed by the announcement that the film is based on true events. Then the text fades away until all that’s left are the words […]
The Philosophy of the Double Bill (Or, How To Stop Worrying and Love Technology)
By Sarah Myles. The perfect double bill is an elusive, mythical thing. A single entertainment event comprised of two unique artistic expressions. A tradition steeped in social history and Hollywood controversy, the evolution of which has shaped our cinema trips for decades and shapes our home-cinema experiences today. First becoming […]
Texas Chainsaw 3D adds no new dimension to Leatherface saga
By Cleaver Patterson. There was a time when the inclusion of 3D in a film title suggested a degree of novel originality. Unfortunately those days are long past with the process now used in horror films to produce little more than substandard cliché shocks, beggaring the question why Texas Chainsaw […]
Fifties Hysteria Returns: Doomsday Prepping in a Culture of Fear, Death, and Automatic Weapons
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” (Print ad for Bushmaster Firearms) I write this as I watch in sadness, surrounded by a bank of televisions at the gym, all conveying images of the “theatre” of war that is now America at Christmas in 2012. The slaying of […]
Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Dedicated to the memory of Rick Lopez. The films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are usually lumped in with those of other ‘gore’ specialists, but it seems to me that this is just one component of Fulci’s work. Running through all his films is […]
2012: The Apocalypse That Never Happened
By Anna Carius. It seems that the Mayans got it wrong. The end of the human civilization, portrayed with such gusto by Roland Emmerich in 2012 (2009), did not happen after all. So if you looked forward to “finding out the truth” and experience that “the end is just the […]
9 Day Hobbit: An Exploration of Cinematic Time
By Diarmuid Corkery. Well before Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit was released, it had already caused controversy among tentative fans due to two disclosed revelations. The first is a decision taken by the director to divide J.R.R. Tolkien’s book into three back-to-back epics. Considering the text itself is […]
21st Philadelphia Film Festival, October 18-28, 2012
By Michael Miller. Unspooling at eight venues across Center City and West Philly, the 21st Philadelphia Film Festival celebrated mainstream, independent, and foreign cinema from local filmmakers and world masters. The festival offered something for every film lover from its various programs, which included World Narratives, New French Films and […]
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
By Cleaver Patterson. It’s here! After a nine year hiatus in director Peter Jackson’s continuing cinematic visualization of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epics chronicling the adventures of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), starring Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman has eventually arrived. The big question is was […]
(Pro)creative Encounters: From Photo-Painting to Video-Film
By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. Media history often seems to be understood as a (d)evolutionary succession of discrete units – one medium devouring the other (for better or worse). But while it may be true that photography, for instance, put painting into serious crisis, we know in retrospect that neither medium disappeared. […]