We turn today to one of the great forgotten filmmakers of France: Raymond Bernard, who along with Rene Clair was primarily responsible for bringing sound to the national cinema, and along with Clair was almost completely forgotten once the Cahiers du Cinéma/Nouvelle vague kids came along to disparage anything in their country’s cinematic history that […]
Quick recap: A Nightmare on Elm Street – maybe the best slasher of the 1980s. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge – a typically stupid although narratively unusual ’80s slasher. Now here comes A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, and it is very possibly the second-best franchise slasher of the 1980s. […]
With Lights in the Dusk, I have seen two films by Aki Kaurismäki, and that makes me as much an expert on the director as 99.5% of the American population. The remaining 0.5% inform me that all in all, this new film is not a particularly distinguished entrant in his canon, and I’m quite sure […]
[Author’s note: this review was originally to have been paired with I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry in a sort of half-assed “Gay and Anti-Gay” theme day. But when push came to shove, I really couldn’t bring myself to pay money to see I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and so this review […]
I know literally two facts about the late filmmaker Theo van Gogh: he is directly descended from that Theo van Gogh, Vincent’s brother; and he was knifed to death by a religious extremist for saying saucy things about Muslims. Thanks to the fanboyish glee of writer/director Steve Buscemi (yeah, you read that right), I have […]
Science fiction in the movies has always had a rough time of it, compared to literature. Not that there aren’t plenty of sci-fi films, of course; but they tend to be much more of the “ray guns and space battles” variety, and not the “speculative musing on the way that our race will function in […]
The natural human inclination is to assume that anything which is rare must also be of high quality, and this has led many of the few people who have been able to see Billy Wilder’s long-lost Ace in the Hole from 1951 (released for the first time on any home video format last week) to […]
Last time: I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street, and declared that it was good. Specifically, I’d declared that it was the best slasher film in 6 years, a pretty damn great horror movie in general, and Wes Craven’s best film after The Hills Have Eyes. It felt good to watch a good horror film, […]
First, I want to mention how very much it amuses me to read review after review proclaiming that Captivity is such a filthy pit of swill that not even the most stalwart masochist could possibly suffer through it, and that it so wholly lacks even a trace of invention that it surely must mark the […]
It’s an odd thing about the Harry Potter franchise: given that the films are based upon a series of books noted for their formulaic structure, and given that they are massively expensive blockbusters, one would suppose, if one knew nothing about them, that each entry would be more or less indistinguishable from the others except […]
I must be honest, and confess that of the two faces of John Waters, I rather prefer the one responsible for such gleefully campy trash as Female Trouble to the one responsible for slightly naughty but essentially harmless mainstream fare like Cry-Baby. It feels to me that the less restraint he puts on bad taste, […]
It’s not exactly the case that I disliked Rescue Dawn because it is a distinctly uncharacteristic project for director Werner Herzog; nor is it exactly the case that I disliked Rescue Dawn because it is essentially a retread of ground that Herzog himself covered to Olympian perfection in the 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to […]
