Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/17 World premiere: 12 February, 2014, Berlin International Film Festival It might have been filmed in color; it might have been filmed in China; it might have been filmed decades after of the essential cultural context of the post-WWII America; but other than those little things, Black Coal, […]

I have wonderful news: Left Behind: World at War isn’t nearly such an angrifying slog as its predecessor, Tribulation Force, and we’ll have none of the bitterness that got in between me and my snark when I wrote about it. Compared to that film, and compared also to 2000’s original Left Behind, the 2005 trilogy-capper […]

Daiei’s second yokai film in 1968, which is most readily found in English under the title Spook Warfare, and with the implication that it came out first (the actual title is much closer to “great yokai war”, which would eventually be used in the Western distribution of a different film 37 years later), is a […]

Winner of a Gold Plaque – Special Mention for OriginalityScreens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/12 & 10/15World premiere: 18 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival Apparently, Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s The Owners is not merely the third in a loosely-connected thematic series of tragicomedies about land ownership in Kazakhstan, but it is directly related to his Constructors […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13World premiere: 10 February, 2014, Berlin International Film Festival I will concede up front that to a certain type of viewer, and it is the type that I am, there’s no way to describe Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro’s feature debut The Way He Looks that makes it sound tolerable. Or […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/10 & 10/12 & 10/16World premiere: 3 May, 2014, Jeonju International Film Festival I am totally unfamiliar with director Pálfi György’s notorious/beloved 2006 Taxidermia except by the outlines of its reputation, so I can’t speak to the accuracy of the common thread I’ve seen in the reviews I’ve peaked at, that his […]

You would not, to watch the 1982 thriller First Blood, expect it to birth the franchise it birthed. Though it’s too much of an action movie to qualify in any other genre, it’s a very brainy, sociologically alert action movie, in which the cultural stratification of the Vietnam War years is found to have echoes, […]

CIFF Opening Night Presentation, 10/9World premiere: 7 September, 2014, Toronto International Film Festival Time for fun with coincidences! What has been, till now (and I suspect it will remain so), the most prominent film adaptation of Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s massively important 1888 play Miss Julie was the 1951 Palme d’Or winner directed by Alf […]

I don’t know at what point director Kaneko Shusuke and writer Ito Kazunori decided that their makeover of Daiei’s loopy turtle monster Gamera was going to be a trilogy, nor do I know if they had it in mind from the very beginning how they were going to end. But oh, how much 1999’s Gamera […]

So, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, the 2002 DTV sequel to the hardcore conservative Christian classic Left Behind. If the only thing you tell me about that film is its title, and the fact that it involves a small group of True Believers facing off against the Antichrist during the Tribulation (which is, in the […]

We can say any number of nasty things about the American cinema of the 1980s – that it’s coldly regressive politically, that it’s corporatised to within an inch of its life, that it’s formulaic to a degree found nowhere else in the history of the American film industry – but there’s one thing that I […]

At the risk of seeming indelicate or bigoted: fundamentalist evangelical Christian genre movies are weird. As I am not remotely the first to point out, they represent a miserable kind of paradox about them: they palpably want to be exciting cinema like wot the heathens all get to watch with their guns and their scantily […]