A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. Author Christopher McKittrick makes a persuasive case for celebrating the consummate professional Miles became rather than mourning the icon she never was….” It says a lot about the fickleness of celebrity that an actress who has worked with some of the industry’s biggest […]
Practice Makes Progress: Danny Turkiewicz’s Stealing Pulp Fiction
By Jonathan Monovich. Stealing Pulp Fiction leaves Tarantino’s ambitious narrative structure behind. Instead, Turkiewicz embraces a straightforward story without twists, turns, and time warps.” A so-called “thief” of film history, Quentin Tarantino’s style, predicated on the referential, looks to the past for influence. Tarantino has long prided himself for “stealing.” […]
Touching the Past Generation: A Photographic Memory
By Will Comerford. The blurring of perspectives in this personal documentary reinforces how much mother and daughter are truly occupying similar psychological spaces, despite living in different decades and contexts.” Why do we document? Why paint a hunt on a cave wall, or write down what Jesus or Confucius said? […]
You Can’t Stop a Wave: Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer
By Jonathan Monovich. For its Australian setting and premise of a man’s descent into insanity, The Surfer unsurprisingly has similarities to the late Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971), but the charm of The Surfer comes from its overt love for Frank Perry’s The Swimmer (1968)….” Though marketed as a […]
The Grotesque and the Sublime: Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight
By William Blick. Hysterical, soul-stirring, and bewildering…undefinable in the best sense of the word.” Occasionally, I will see a film wherein I do not know where it will lead me. It is at this time that there is often a leap of faith in putting my trust in the hands […]
“Pain Creates Character Distortion”: David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds
By Jonathan Monovich. Conspiracies brew throughout the film and their legitimacy, though probable, becomes increasingly unbelievable, mirroring the mind’s desperation for answers….” In Dead Ringers (1988), the troubled Dr. Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons) says that “pain creates character distortion.” This quote encapsulates the essence of David Cronenberg’s oeuvre. Cronenberg has […]
A Strange Passion Indeed: Luis Buñuel’s Él (1953)
By Jeremy Carr. This story of hidden obsessions and malicious passions, climaxing in a scene of wild delirium, is like a bipolar soap opera and tragicomedy rolled into one subtly piercing satire of masculinity, authority, and persecution.” A Good Friday mass is underway. Somber music plays while altar boys have […]
Big Day for a Small Finnish Town: Cinéma Laika
By Jonathan Monovich. Vidak/Felce’s film serves as a meaningful exploration of the role that cinema and movie theaters play in our lives.” Driving through the wooded roads of Karkkila, a small Finnish town, Emmanuelle Felce tells Veljko Vidak “I could live here. You can be in deep nature, beautiful nature. […]
Restauranteur, Dance Instructor, Hitman: Kazuo Mori’s A Certain Killer and A Killer’s Key (Arrow Video)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Light on their feet but not rushed, fun but not goofy, these films deliver just about everything you’d want from the hitman genre….” In 1967, Japanese director Kazuo Mori released back-to-back actioners starring Raizô Ichikawa as the archetypal hitman. Coldblooded, principled, calm under pressure—and often seen […]
It’s a Mad World, After All: Marco Ferreri: The Films of an Italian Provocateur
A Book Review by William Blick. In the true spirit of monomaniacal, egomaniacal, and nomadic film auteurs everywhere, Curti brings a vivaciousness to the text that immersed this reader into the brilliant and grotesquely absurdist world of Ferreri.” In film scholar Roberto Curti’s new book Marco Ferreri: The Films of […]