In 1964, Hammer Films was in the midst of its most prolific era of making popular genre films – at a glance I’d set the golden years between ’62 and ’67, with the balance favoring the middle of that window – having turned the early Gothic horror successes into a brand name in virtually no […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/16 & 10/18 World premiere: 10 May, 2013, India You tell me if this sounds appealing or hopelessly stupid: modern stoner comedy classic Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle meets infamously terrible video game adaptation House of the Dead. I can’t actually say what it sounds like to me at this […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/21 & 10/23 World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival Writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman is, to start with, an irresistibly weird movie. It’s also, I believe, an intensely angry movie, though the anger is a little bit hard to suss out underneath all the weirdness. It is […]
The good news first: The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete does not elect to render that inevitable defeat as “death by radiation poisoning”, meaning that a bare minimum, this isn’t the most depressing movie about a pair of children hunting desperately for food and shelter that has ever been made. And golly, when you’ve […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/22 & 10/23World premiere: 1 March, 2013, Guadalajara International Film Festival The longer I think about Rodrigo Reyes’s documentary Purgatorio: A Journey into the Heart of the Border, ostensibly about life along the border between Mexico and the United States, the more I am convinced that the best way to approach it […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/20 & 10/22World premiere: 12 February, 2013, Berlin International Film Festival Firstly, Jafar Panahi isn’t supposed to be making films at all. This is something that everybody knows who cares about Iranian film at all, of course, and it doesn’t need repeating, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that […]
The transformation of Hammer Films into the world’s most prominent home for edgy, brutal, sexy genre films was completed almost entirely on the backs of 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein and 1958’s Dracula, released in America as Horror of Dracula (the fuse was, however, lit by the violent sci-fi/horror film The Quatermass Xperiment). And as […]
There is something especially wonderful about watching a hyped-up movie that justifies it. So let me now add to the increasing pile of loving encomiums for 12 Years a Slave, which probably isn’t actually as good as the OH MY GOD tenor of the reviews have promised – for starters, it’s definitely not director Steve […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/19 & 10/21World premiere: 29 September, 2012, CNEX Documentary Film Festival It’s not the exact literal first thing that happens in Mothers, but it’s awfully early on that director Xu Hui-jing, in voice-over, explains his particular relationship to China’s “One Child” population control policy: he was the second child born to his […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/21 & 10/23World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival The documentary Stop-Over begins with what’s far too swift and deadly to call it a sucker punch: more like a stiletto darted into the heart. Kaveh Bakhtiari’s first feature-length project starts with a filmed conversation about the rough life of an […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/21 & 10/22 & 10/23World premiere: 28 June, 2013, Taipei Film Festival The most unsettling moment in Soul – a movie in which unsettling things are not rare – comes when a young man, Wang A-Chuan (Joseph Chang), having already demonstrated his crazy-bastard bona fides to us is confronted by his father […]
The word “gimmick” almost always comes with a certain sneering tone of superiority attached: the suggestion is inherent that a thing was less gimmicky, it would be improved as a result. This is not a hard-and-true relationship. There is, for example, the career of director & producer William Castle, whose film career could not be […]
