By Thomas Puhr. Tews blends green-screen footage, miniature work, practical effects, and a grainy sound design to mimic the look and feel of a ‘50s creature feature (that is, one which has smoked too much pot).” The success of writer-director Ryland Brickson Cole Tews’ (try saying that name five times […]
Chloë Grace Moretz Kicks Ass in Roseanne Liang’s Shadow in the Cloud
By Elias Savada. A small, fierce gem…. Moretz lets it all out with a thrilling performance.” This movie reminds me of the intense, claustrophobic approach to air travel that 7500 did earlier this year. For me, Shadow in the Cloud is a more frantic and enjoyable effort. The action moves […]
History, Criticism, and Splendid Extras: On V. F. Perkins on Movies
Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955) By Jeremy Carr. This deceptively uncomplicated language in fact sustains some of the most profound observations on cinema ever recorded.” Anyone who has read V. F. Perkins’s influential 1972 text Film as Film will find much that is familiar in V. F. Perkins on Movies, […]
From Straight to Hell Comes Jack Ford: Straight Shooting (1917) and Hell Bent (1918)
Straight Shooting By Tony Williams. These two magnificent Blu-ray restorations reproduce the way the films were originally seen and also contain audio-commentaries and video essays by two pioneering Ford scholars: Joseph McBride and Tag Gallagher.” Following on the trail pioneered by the 2016 re-release of John Ford’s Three Bad Men […]
Trouble in the DC Universe (the City and the Comics): Wonder Woman 1984
By Elias Savada. Like so many presents found under the tree this Christmas Day, there might be a lot of folks asking for a refund after viewing this sad excuse for a sequel. It’s a wonder that Warner Bros. has let its prized new female-empowerment franchise slide off the rails […]
A Smash in the Face: Greenland
Another Clarke (the Comet) arrives for the Christmas movie season. By Elias Savada. Greenland, the latest comet disaster flick to smash into our planet, will be one easily forgotten. Comets and meteors and asteroids, oh my! These bits of interstellar debris have been attacking our audio-visual senses for ages, fictionally […]
The Journey of Analyzing Terror, On and Offscreen: on Monsters, Law, Crime
On a critical examination of how the “monstrous” is constructed by various societies or social milieu. Study of horror and the monstrous onscreen has taken many routes, from the philosophical, the psychoanalytic, and beyond. Recent volumes like The Monster Theory Reader and Robin Wood on the Horror Film (the late […]
That’s Why I Don’t Own the World: Hollywood’s Hard Luck Ladies
Rita Johnson (with Ray Milland) in The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948) A Book Review by Zoe Kurland. With meticulous details gathered from an impressive variety of sources, Hollywood’s Hard Luck Ladies implies that, regardless of luck, Hollywood was (and is) quite unkind to women, especially those who attempt to […]
Stay for a While: Patrick Picard’s The Bloodhound
By Thomas Puhr. A bold work, one which – though scattershot – still ranks among 2020’s superior genre releases.” A hooded figure emerges from a lake. Without making a sound, it crawls over the rocky shore, through the doorway of a sleek house, and into a closet, where it will […]
Return of the “Beast”: Shawn Linden on Hunter Hunter
By Ali Moosavi. I knew that it was a story that could be done with very little resources, so the punch that it would have to pack would be thematic and content wise.” Like cigarettes, some movies ought to come with a health warning. Hunter Hunter, written and directed by […]