A Stumble in the Woods: First Kill

By Elias Savada. Bruce Willis still tracks 243 on the IMDB.com STARmeter scale (I’m at 1,325,678). All kind of entertainment folk are part of the ratings, and Willis has been moving downward lately after decades in the top 100. His gradual tumble down the rankings rabbit hole began with the […]

Escaping Type: An Interview with Aubrey Peeples

By Paul Risker. From B-picture phenomenon Sharknado (2013), an abducted daughter in the revenge thriller Rage (2014), a rendezvous with history in A Conversation: Anne Frank Meets God (2014), to the fantasy leanings as the title role in Jem and the Holograms (2016) – the past, present and future has […]

Conspirators: A San Francisco Film Society Hong Kong Cinema Review

By Janine Gericke. Conspirators is the third film in Oxide Pang’s Detective trilogy, beginning with The Detective (2007) and The Detective 2 (2011). All three films star Aaron Kwok as detective Chan Tam. Pang should be somewhat familiar to American audiences, having given us a remake of his own film […]

Chance, Chaos, Confusion and the Marketing of The Wicker Man

By Linda Hutcheson. ‘Incredibly, in many European countries, the attitude still exists that a good film shouldn’t really have to be marketed at all, that the public will somehow instinctively find and appreciate artistic quality without the assistance of a vulgar marketing campaign.’ (Puttnam 1997: 314, emphasis in the original) […]

Recent Contemporary Protest Cinema and Political-Cultural Exoticism

By Hamed Soleimanzadeh. By bringing attention to the challenges of the surrounding world, exotic protest cinema encourages audiences to take responsibility against the injustices and inefficiencies.” The concept of political-cultural exoticism in protest cinema refers to the presentation and understanding of ethnic, national, and regional cultures and policies in films […]