The found footage horror movie, birthed by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project and thrust into the big time by 2008’s Cloverfield, burned itself out rather quickly, as will happen to a genre so cheap that you need neither a good idea nor talent to whip together something which enough damn fools will trudge out to […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/15World premiere: 19 May, 2012, Cannes Film Festival We do not dislike Beyond the Hills – this is as much an affirmation as a preemptive clarification. It would be quite impossible to dislike in which so much, for such a large part of the running time, is amazing. Nor do […]
There’s only one surprise involved with The Possession, the latest in the undying genre of exorcism movies, but it’s a doozy. As it turns out, shockingly, The Possession is almost a good movie, which for this particular subgenre is a real achievement. Not that I say “almost” a good movie, and not a good movie […]
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: as happens so often, the summer movie season wraps up with a dodgy horror picture, The Possession, a rare […]
If the stupid people are right and 2012 ends up being the last year of human existence, it could hardly have gotten off to a more appropriate start than The Devil Inside, which suggests at least this much: the race for Worst Film of the Year is going to be extremely competitive. Here is how […]
Every Sunday 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: X-Men: First Class may or may not be the most ill-advised of the summer’s superhero movies, but it’s hard […]
Every Sunday 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: X-Men: First Class may or may not be the most ill-advised of the summer’s superhero movies, but it’s hard […]
It’s lazy to attack a genre film for being a genre film. That is to say, there’s no point in complaining that a movie hews too closely to well-worn tropes when it’s those tropes that make us want to see a film in the first place. “That Western has too much gorgeous landscape photography!” “That […]
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: movies with “Exorcism” in the title tend to be barrel-scraping exercises indeed, and how nice of The Last Exorcism […]
In 1976, a 23-year-old German woman named Anneliese Michel who had been treated for psychotic episodes died of starvation following an attempted exorcism. The attending priests and her parents were both convicted of manslaughter. This story was turned into two movies in the last two years: the first was the American The Exorcism of Emily […]
