It worked for one seemingly flagging sci-fi franchise, why not another? Apparently, George Miller is taking a page from J.J. Abram’s revisionist book in hopes of rebooting the Aussie action saga he created with his Mad Max trilogy, soon to become a quartet. It remains to be seen whether this latest “mad” installment will be …
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 …
The venerable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise “has acquired the global rights to the property from the Mirage Group and 4Kids Entertainment.” “The global intellectual property rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… cost $60 million.” Nickolodeon already has plans for the newly acquired property: the company’s “sister company Paramount will steer a new Teenage …
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 …
Both critically and commercially, District 9 is one of the biggest hits of the year. Now Media Rights Capital has committed to fund filmmaker Neill Blomkamp’s next film, an untitled science fiction film which will be set on another planet. Blomkamp hopes his new film will be commercial but says that “it is very much …
80’s robot is a promising movie theme to begin this column. Basically any movie with this combination could fit in the Best-Worst category but I’ve managed to narrow it down to the three most satisfying. Rocky 4 (1985) Directed Sylvester Stallone. Like the Godfather trilogy, the Rocky series seems to have poor connotations with anything …
1- The Children The concept of killer kids is nothing new, but The Children can safely join the list of great horror movies like The Omen, Home Movie, The Exorcist, The Innocents and Village of the Damned. The film is directed by Tom Shankland who also adapted the script form a story by Paul Andrew …
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 …
The 22ndd edition of the Image Nation film festival (Montreal’s only GLBT film fest) will pay tribute to the horror genre with a festival focus that runs the gamut from the deadpan southern gothic thriller Drool to the twisted Dream Boy and the silly and ultimately good old fashioned blood n gore zombie flick, Zombies …
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 …
The Greek film Dogtooth by director Yorgos Lanthimos won the $15,000 Louve D’Or prize at the 38th Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinema at the weekend. The seriously twisted black comedy stunned audiences world wide starting at Cannes where it picked up the Prix Un Certain Regard. Always unpredictable and certainly provocative, the picture is bound …
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 star-studded event known as The Spike TV Scream Awards was held Saturday October 18th at the Greek Theatre. The event honored the best in sci-fi, horror, fantasy and comic-inspired movies and TV shows. Fans voted online for the winners, so some of the year’s most popular programs and big box-office hits took home trophies, …