The Tom Cruise intro I have spent a larger portion of my life thinking of Tom Cruise as a bobble-headed pretty boy than otherwise, but like all false beliefs, once you realise it’s not true, it’s hard to remember why you ever thought that way in the first place. I mean, yes, Top Gun, and […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/21World premiere: 17 January, 2014, Sundance Film Festival The business of being a fan of horror movies is a frustrating and thankless one, since they are so especially prone to being bad, but ever so often one comes along that you can stand up and cheer and point at and […]
Daiei Film’s third and final film centered around yokai, 1969’s Along with Ghosts (a very unlovely title, but the literal translation isn’t much better), is certainly the weakest of the three. And the least centered around yokai. In fact, while 100 Monsters would be hollowed out to almost nothing without having the paranormal entities covered […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20World premiere: 28 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival The Look of Silence is unmistakably a great film, though it is not a singular one. For one thing, it isn’t an object totally complete unto itself, like director Joshua Oppenheimer’s previous work, The Act of Killing: it is a sequel […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/19 World premiere: 28 August, 2013, general release in Iceland From its 2013 release in its native Iceland all the way to its present international festival run, the pitch for writer-director Benedikt Erlingsson’s terrific debut feature Of Horses and Men (the original Iclandic title, which is universes better in its […]
Seven years after Kaneko Shusuke put to bed his grand re-casting of goofy-ass ’60s monster Gamera as something like a force of nature over a trilogy of some of the best daikaiju eiga ever made, Kadokawa Pictures – the company that had ultimately gathered up the tattered remains of Daiei Film in the interim – […]
Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best CinematographyScreens at CIFF: 10/14 & 10/16 & 10/22World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival 1001 Grams is, first and foremost, a precious movie. It has a darling little shadowbox of a plot in which heightened characters move through immaculately quirky setpieces on their way to a […]
Winner of the Gold Hugo for Best Film Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 30 August, 2014, Venice International Film Festival Satire doesn’t get much more on-the-nose, snottily sarcastic, or, in fairness, absolutely hilarious as the opening of The President, a most uncharacteristic but hugely welcome surprise from self-exiled Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 & 10/15 & 10/16 World premiere: 1 February, 2014, Gérardmer International Fantastic Film Festival The first act of Ablations is great. Maybe not great. But promising – hella promising. A man wakes up on the bank of a river, the day after a huge bender, and his kidney’s missing. He wants […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/17 & 10/19World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival Movies about ideas are wonderful things; movies that are “About Ideas” to the point where they start to disappear inside their own ass are much less so. And the French-made Iranian film Red Rose (that is, the crew and […]
That Gone Girl is something close to a mechanically flawless thriller I take to be more of an objective reality than an opinion. There is great mastery to be found in Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography, using the harsh sharpness of digital video to render suburban spaces with an exaggerated realism, making them pop so hard that […]
The best movies are the ones that introduce you to a totally new experience. One of those happened to me at Annabelle. I have literally never had anything even a little bit like this happen to me before, and I don’t know if it will ever happen again, though I can live in hope: after […]
