By Elias Savada. It’s another hung-out-to-dry whodunit…in which you never really learn whodunit.” Will The Rental do more damage to the home sharing business than the Covid-19 virus already has? Probably not, but this cautionary tale – an adequate variant of the Cabin in the Woods horror sub-genre, might cause […]
“Genetic Memory of War”: Elem Klimov’s Come and See (Criterion Collection)
The idea,” states Klimov’s brother and collaborator, German Klimov, “was to tell the truth.” By Jeremy Carr. Elem Klimov’s Come and See, an unremitting 1985 opus and one of Soviet cinema’s great anti-war dramas, enjoyed a swift and positive period of reevaluation when a new restoration made its theatrical rounds […]
Ghosts of War Gone Awry
If it feels like Final Destination at war, that’s because Bress was a writer on some of those popular films. By Elias Savada. I was hoping the new film from Eric Bress, his first solo directorial effort after 2004’s lightly entertaining science fiction thriller The Butterfly Effect – which he […]
Hello, Vietnam: Trinh Dinh Le Minh on Goodbye Mother
By Tom Ue. Trinh Dinh Le Minh’s new film Goodbye Mother tells a seemingly familiar story: Van (Lanh Thanh) returns to his home in Vietnam, having been away in the US for nine years. Van brings with him his boyfriend Ian (Vo Dien Gia Huy) but the film’s focus is […]
Vampires Who Go to High School: Everyday Women’s Culture in Twilight, Dracula, and Fifty Shades of Grey
By Caolan Madden. The following is excerpted from Buffy to Batgirl: Essays on Female Power, Evolving Femininity and Gender Roles in Science Fiction and Fantasy © 2019 Edited by Julie M. Still and Zara T. Wilkinson by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com. During […]
Temporal and Spatial Movement – Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics, Edited by Louis Bayman and Natália Pinazza
Embrace the Serpent (2015) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Movement, both literal and figurative, is an inherent aspect of cinema: the actors, the camera, and even the filmstrip itself – speeding through a projector – are largely defined by their movements. Perhaps most emblematic of this fundamental quality is […]
Immortality Has Come To This: The Old Guard
“A passable piece of mythology that feigns to be a culturally relevant action flick.” By Elias Savada. A funny thing happened on the way to this movie. It took a second viewing of The Old Guard to figure out it is an ok action flick. On a high-definition 60-inch television, […]
Faces to Remember: They Coulda Been Contenders by Dan Van Neste
Karen Morley, with Osgood Perkins and Paul Muni, in Scarface (1932) A Book Review by Tony Williams. This 2019 book from BearManor Media is a well-compiled series of career surveys and interviews of several screen personalities, some of whom may be familiar to the general viewer, others who have been […]
“My Name is Edna”: Fragmentation, Space and Identity in Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Creswick is a small town of around 3000 people just outside Ballarat, a regional area in the Australian southern state of Victoria. Japanese-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James has solid professional form working in this part of the country; almost a decade ago she posted on Facebook about […]
Aorta Be in Pictures: The Filmmaking Mystery of Gregory Hatanaka and His Latest, Heartbeat
By Rod Lott. If you have run across Gregory Hatanaka’s name, it most likely was affixed to Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance, his well-intentioned, but ill-advised sequel to the legendarily bad 1991 movie he didn’t make. If it’s true you can’t make a cult movie on purpose, that 2015 disappointment […]