Some people don’t like the first Dune by David Lynch, but of course, they’re crazy. With a stunning cast like the effortless Kyle MacLachlan, badass Sting, the mysterious Jürgen Prochnow, the black-goop-dripping Kenneth McMillan, the incomparable Linda Hunt as Shadout Mapes…coupled with the as-cool-and-strange-as-it-gets-for-1984 effects, not to mention the storyline itself… come on, it rocks! …
Avatar, James Cameron’s $200 million dollar sci-fi epic and the first feature film he’s directed since Titanic, has been surrounded by much hype, anticipation, and now controversy. Sci-fi fans and film bloggers are calling into question Cameron’s ethics as discussions of plagiarism start to make the rounds on the web. Speculation started in full force …
The Informant! Directed by Steven Soderbergh You can’t keep a good executive down. After ENRON, after Lehman Brothers and the continuing fury at executive bonuses it was quite a change to see the corporate executive class as brimming with ineffective buffoons rather than coldly calculated capitalist psychopaths, in The Informant! Matt Damon stars as the …
In the past ten years MODERNCINÉ has been dedicated to making high-quality, groundbreaking and edgy horror films avoiding clichés and complacency in favor of original ideas and memorable performances. Founded by Andrew van den Houten during his college years, Andrew began producing and directing a number of award-winning short films including the 2005 multiple award …
The debut of a number of distinctive personalities is one of the important features of film noir. Noir’s main character, for instance, may appropriately be labeled thenoir loser. He is a handsome, middle-aged man who seems to blur the line between protagonist and antagonist. Billy Wilder has very explicitly introduced such personalities as Walter Neff …
The Limits of Control Directed by Jim Jarmusch The Exploding Girl Directed by Bradley Rust In the early 1990s, slacker cinema was all the rage in American independent cinema, with wacky, mumbling characters, slow pacing and the mundanity of everyday life replacing traditional plots, characterisations and drama. Which brings us to these two Amerindie offerings. …
Night of the Living Dead For a horror film, Night of the Living Dead (1968) is set in an usual local; not Transylvania, but Pennsylvania. Almost universally panned by critics when released, the film eventually developed a cult following, playing on the midnight movie circuit for more than a decade and becoming one of the …
Cold Souls Directed by Sophie Barthes Charlie Kaufman’s attorneys must be pleased. The first phrase one grasps at to describe Sophie Barthes debut feature, Cold Souls, is ‘Kaufmanesque’: a metaphysical comedy with an absurd, fantastical central proposition, be it a machine that erases memories of a failed love affair or a puppet master accessing the …
Director Duncan Jones is on a mission to get actor Sam Rockwell an Oscar nomination by getting behind a grassroots fan campaign. Sony Pictures isn’t offering to put any money into any sort of promotion and so we here at Sound On Sight are helping out. Personally I think Duncan should also be nominated for …
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus Directed by Terry Gilliam A glance at the film posters could almost convince you that a new Harry Potter was upon us. The troubled final film of Heath Ledger prior to his premature death in February of last year has finally been released after a Herculean effort on the part of the …
The Road Directed by John Hillcoat For fans of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road, the novel’s journey from page to screen has been almost as harrowing as the one endured by the book’s protagonists. Delayed by over a year due to unspecified wrangling within the temple of Miramax, this grim, biblical parable is finally seeing the light of day …
Handsome Harry Directed by Bette Gordon A spectacular cast and a deliberate tone help to distract from director Bette Gordon’s Handsome Harry, which acts both as an emotionally detailed character study and a slightly ungainly road movie. The titular Harry (Jamey Sheridan), an aging ex-Navy electrician, is shaken from his cozy small-town existence when he …
2007 saw the release of Into the Wild, the movie based on Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book chronicling Christopher McCandless’ journey into the unknown. Marking Sean Penn’s fourth directorial work, the soundtrack for the movie became Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder’s first solo album. He wrote most of the songs appearing in the film while …
Directed by Spike Jonze As I left the cinema Friday night still reeling from my experience, I realized that the perfect barometer for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are was the 4-year old girl walking with her mom in front of me. Throughout the film I could hear her alternating between laughing, crying and …
Offspring Directed by Andrew van den Houten The horror genre must be doing wonders to Maine’s tourism development. Having spent many a summer on the quaint sandy beaches in small town Maine, never did I once come across a cannibalistic feral child wielding an impressively handcrafted axe nor did I encounter any wild mutts with …
Mother Directed by Joon-Ho Bong Maternal pain is the driving force behind Korean wunderkind Joon-Ho Bong’s fourth feature, acting as the practically exclusive catalyst for a film that seems to delight in toying with audience expectations. Kim Hye-Ja, whose thin resumé does nothing to foreshadow her towering work here, stars as the titular matriarch, whose …
Dirty Mind Directed by Peter Van Hees Left Bank director Peter Van Hees tries his hand at offbeat comedy in Dirty Mind, which centers around a conceit that seems promising on paper but winds up as the delivery system for a disappointingly familiar experience. Wim Helsem, impressive in his feature debut, stars as meek stuntman’s …
A term that translates to ‘Black Film’ already sounds interesting. Add to that dramatic, highly stylized cinematography and hard-hitting, gritty writing, and the appeal of film noir is clear. The term is mostly attributed to works such as Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, and The Maltese Falcon, all major works which helped popularize the genre after …
Burning Down the House Directed by Mandy Stein No One Knows About Persian Cats Directed by Bahman Ghobadi Teheran, Iran and New York aren’t obvious kindred spirits and unlikely to be twinned in any civic program any time soon, but two music-related films at the festival point out how underground culture can act as the …
The ‘long take’, a film technique born in the middle of the 20th century, is often neglected by modern directors in favor of a more rapid-fire, MTV-inspired editing style. In fact, as the medium grows older, the average shot length (ASL) decreases; according to Swivel.com, the ASL of American films has dropped from 10.5 seconds …
Two Lines (2008) Directed by Selim Evci At first, Selim Evci’s Two Lines seems almost as taciturn as another Turkish export, Distant (it must be a Turkish film-maker thing, for the real-life Turks I know simply love talking) and also features two main protagonists with hardly any supporting characters to speak of. It hardly feels …
London Film Festival: Lessons in Love Dear Lemon Lima, dir Suzi Yoonessi Wah Do Dem dir Sam Fleischner/Ben Chace A Thing Called Love (shorts programme) Today’s lesson is all about love: the things we we do, etc. Poor Vanessa Lemor (l’amour—get it?). All she wanted when she entered Nichols High School was to maintain the …
George A. Romero knows what scares you. He also knows what your insides look like, and since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, he’s been putting both on display in what’s now an epic six film zombie series. The first three films in the hexalogy, widely regarded as classics of the horror genre, were released …