If it had done nothing else to distinguish itself, 1982’s The Slumber Party Massacre would stand out in the crowded glut of early ’80s slasher films by virtue of being written by a feminist. Not, please understand, the kind of everyday feminist that anybody could be who believes in equality between the sexes and calls […]

The textbooks will have you know that the United States entered the Second World War on 8 December, 1941, the day after the Empire of Japan bombed the U.S. naval yards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And while this is technically true, it would be a damned lie to act like imminent war wasn’t much on […]

I’ll ask you to forgive me for being perverse enough to start a discussion of the most notoriously impersonal and inhumane film of Stanley Kubrick’s career with a personal statement, but I don’t really know what else to do. The thing is, y’see, I love Barry Lyndon – not because it is great, but because […]

There is a particular interest in watching filmmakers with a strong, distinctive visual style making their first movie using this or that technology; and there’s a similar appeal to watching such filmmakers stretching outside of their comfort zones of tone and genre. So the first color film and first Western made by German expatriate Fritz […]

The worst flaw, by far, of Disney’s new adventure in branding, Maleficent, is that it’s operating in completely bad faith. This isn’t a retelling of the same company’s 1959 animated masterpiece Sleeping Beauty, told from the perspective of the villain; it’s not a backstory that explains how the villain used to be good before turning […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: with Maleficent, Disney updates a great cartoon from their Silver Age with a dubious live-action update that feels like […]

The recent conversation about the state of the romcom in the 2010s – is it dead or dying? is it revivable? why do people hate laughter and love – amuses me to no end, because it misses the most important part of all: the golden age of romantic comedy was over before most of the […]

The Town that Dreaded Sundown is not the most important film in the career of director Charles B. Pierce – almost beyond question, that honor goes to 1972’s The Legend of Boggy Creek – and maybe it’s not even his most interesting. It is, however, his best, and the one that best combines the director’s […]