By Thomas Puhr. If you’re willing to surrender to the testosterone-saturated, borderline fascistic dialogue – at times, the characters’ locker room banter sounds like it’s taken from a subpar John Milius script, or an unironic Paul Verhoeven film – there’s some pleasure to be had.” With his latest genre exercise, […]
Fiction Telling Early Hollywood About Itself: from The Last Word
By Justin Gautreau. Well aware of film’s representational constraints, technologically and politically, these writers told a different story than the one early Hollywood could tell about itself.” From its earliest days in Southern California, the film industry inspired a body of fiction that helped shape Hollywood as a place of romance […]
Nature in a Beautiful Vacuum: Mindaugas Survila’s The Ancient Woods
By Thomas Puhr. Does a document of a unique place not lost some of its impact if packaged in a sociocultural vacuum? Perhaps, but as a means to contemplation and appreciation, The Ancient Woods exudes an undeniable power.” The Ancient Woods (2017), a nature documentary filmed in Lithuania, says a […]
Lost in a Genre Maze: Nick Stagliano’s The Virtuoso
By Theresa Rodewald. Could be an enjoyable action thriller [but] jumps between locations, plot points, and flashbacks without ever deciding which story to tell.” The Virtuoso (Anson Mount), an enigmatic hitman, lives a solitary life in the woods. After a mission goes awry, the Virtuoso reluctantly accepts a mysterious job, […]
Shadows: Bela Lugosi on the Hungarian Silent Screen
Lugosi and Ila Lóth in a Hungarian silent film, possibly Leoni Leo (Leo Leoni, 1917)
Fans Only: The Super-Human Muddle of Mortal Kombat
By Elias Savada. It’s part origin story and part training film, where some of the warriors have to awaken his or her arcana, the energy within their soul that imbues them with special powers. Players know the term. I didn’t.” I am not the target audience for this film. Pac-Man, […]
The Experimental Past – 3-D Rarities: Volume 2
El corazón y la espada (The Sword of Granada), 1953
Bummer: Craig Pryce’s The Marijuana Conspiracy
By Elias Savada. As The Marijuana Conspiracy pushes toward its hazy end, the drugged-out zombies don’t seem to be as energetic or fun-loving as at the beginning.” I suspect the last thing you want to do in a light cannabis dramedy about the “weed with roots in hell” — a […]
The Courier, or the Ongoing Uses of the Cold War
By Christopher Sharrett. The Courier has some touching moments…. but we should keep in mind that there is much more to this story.” As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 1980s, some U.S. politicians talked about a “peace dividend,” that is, the possibility that money, for years thrown at […]
Possibilities of Post-Cinema: Discorrelated Images
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)