———- Air Doll Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda A bizarre but not entirely alien blend of social commentary, fairy tale, and old-fashioned tragedy, Air Doll helps to further cement Hirokazu Koreeda as an effective conveyor of unique, memorable imagery, even if it doesn’t quite cohere into the emotionally wrought masterpiece it seems very much to be …
Some 3D movies can be done pretty well, Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon proved this point. But with this rising trend there has been an increasing decline. Movie after movie, audiences are being bombarded with 3D films, but most of them are all post converted. Films that were not meant to be in …
Like Freddie Wong’s “Light Warfare,” Clinton Jones doesn’t hold back on creativity and fun independent film making. With a good mixture of special effects, well shot action sequences, intense music and suspenseful moments, “Cardboard Warfare” was really exciting and I hope these guys create more fun short films in the future. Check out Jone’s aka …
“It’s hard to pigeonhole Symbol in any particular genre, but I would best describe it as a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon on crack.” Symbol Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto While watching Symbol, for a fleeting moment I wondered if someone had slipped something in my drink or sprinkled an illicit substance on my popcorn. What else …
The Devils Directed by Ken Russell Nearly forty years after its release, The Devils remains shocking. It is both unabashedly critical of establishment while also refusing to adhere to the commonly accepted conventions of “serious” cinema. Stylistically, the film employs an unconventional score, an overzealous use of zoom (to be fair, it was the 70s) …
Austin’s beloved genre film festival, Fantastic Fest, last seen awarding The Human Centipede with massive accolades, has begun to reveal its 2010 lineup. The thus far revealed films are suitably intriguing, promising aural terrorism (Sound of Noise), a telepathic killing machine that is also a tire (Rubber), at least a couple young ladies who will …
“There’s a potentially great movie trying to get out of the mediocre one that is Doghouse, a trashy horror comedy that’s disappointingly refined.”Doghouse” Doghouse Directed by Jake West While Jake West’s Doghouse would not be the first low-rent horror movie to be accused of misogyny, the British horror comedy’s claim to fame is that it …
Composer Steven Severin (also known as a founding member of Siouxsie and the Banshees) has bolstered his program on Thursday with the «Music for Silents» collection of short films that he will score live in addition to Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet! This brings the running time of the program up to approx. 110min, …
“The Big Lebowski Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” is the adequate, but flawed child of an excellent film.
Summer blockbuster season is a perfect time for the movie fans to show their true colors. For some, the appeal strikes with a comic book inspired action movie, as in Iron Man 2. For others, it might be a laugh-out-loud high concept comedy, as in Get Him to the Greek. But for cult geeks like …
US company Netflix will begin offering online subscription service to Canada this fall. This will be the first foray into the international market for the company, which currently offers both an online subscription service and DVD by mail to American customers for a low monthly fee ($8.99 US), though there are currently no plans to …
Easily one of the most requested titles for Blu-ray™ from Anchor Bay Entertainment’s unparalleled library of horror films, Sam Raimi’s 1981 cult classic The Evil Dead will officially make its high definition debut on August 31st with The Evil Dead Blu-ray™. For the release, two all-new 1080p anamorphic transfers in 1.85 and the original director-composed …
Initially, I was somewhat wary of Chad Archibald’s Neverlost, the Guelph-shot genre film premiering at Fantasia tomorrow. After all, its story of a failed screenwriter living in squalor while struggling with insomnia and depression sounds like a documentary about my early twenties, except with fewer Star Trek conventions. But the film ended up being an …
“A film that like it or not delivers exactly (and only) what its title implies which is enough to lure the most satiated genre fans.” The Human Centipede (First Sequence) Directed by Tom Six An all-too-familiar setup finds a couple of pretty American tourists (Ashley C. Williams and Ashlynn Yennie) stranded in the woods when …
Bite Me! Toronto can add another film festival to its already considerable roster. This past weekend, first annual Bite Me! Toronto International Body Image Film and Arts Festival took place at the NFB’s Mediatheque before an enthusiastic audience. The festival, brainchild of journalist and scholar Jill Andrews, was conceived as an entertaining and accessible way …
——————— The Disappearance of Alice Creed Directed by J Blakeson In the post-Tarantino era, a good crime movie is hard to find. A new generation of filmmakers watched Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and especially Pulp Fiction in awe, while also thinking, “I could do that.” Sadly the great majority of them could not, and the …
Undertones: Volume 10 In 1977, amongst works by Beethoven, Chuck Berry and examples of indigenous music from around the world, Blind Willie Johnson’s mournful blues work, “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” was shot into space as part of the Voyager Golden Record. Launched from the Voyager spacecraft, the collection of music, sounds …
A Serbian Film Directed by Srdjan Spasojevic It would be easy to dismiss A Serbian Film on the grounds of its boundary-pushing imagery. “Disturbing” does not begin to cover some of the images and scenarios the film presents, and the anger they inspire can easily hamper judging the film on its merits. At a very …
Korean cinema is perpetually rediscovering itself and finding new ways to combine genres and conventions, breathing new life into old stories and looking back at its own history to reconsider the present. Perhaps this would explain why the majority of my favourite films in the past decade have all come out of Korea. The prospects …
——————– Inception Directed by Christopher Nolan For a filmmaker often accused of possessing a cold, clinical, fussy approach, Christopher Nolan seems to produce an awful lot of movies propelled by obsession. His 2000 breakthrough, Memento, used its backwards structure to underline the jumbled frustration of its protagonist – in the same way, Nolan has consistently …
We Are What We Are Directed by Jorge Michel Grau Screenplay by Jorge Michel Gray 2010, Mexico The completed version of Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are had its North American premiere at the Fantasia Film Festival and left audiences very content on their way out. In the same way, Let The Right …
——————— The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Directed by Jon Turtletaub Eight decades into its run as the world’s most popular purveyor of mainstream family entertainment, Disney still can’t shake a fe unfortunate narrative tendencies, many of which are on display in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a fantasy-adventure flick that qualifies as being somewhat above-average as far as its …
Cult Cinema: Volume 3 In the 1950s, a group of French writers revolutionized film criticism with the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. By re-evaluating the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Hughes, among others, the critics gave birth to a grand unified ‘auteur theory,’ which positions the director as the ultimate creative force behind …