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, …

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 …

All the Oscar attention he got for Little Children payed off in a big way for former child star turned toast of the town Jackie Earle Haley. Haley, who made fanboys cream their pants with his performance as Rorschach (Watchmen) and soon to star upcoming Michael Bay-led reboot of Nightmare on Elm Street (playing Freddy …

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 …

Enter The Void Directed by Gasper Noé Ever since the notorious Irreversible prompted the dubious honor of causing the largest walkout in Cannes history back in 2002, Gallic maverick Gasper Noé appears to have been paying the rent with a couple of music videos, an advert (appropriately enough) for condoms and a contributing entry to …

The director of gut-wrenching films such as Dancer In The Dark, chalk line experimental films about America (Dogville), and the co-founder of a movement of pure cinema known as Dogma, Lars Von Trier returns to the realm of Science Fiction with a psychological disaster film called Planet Melancholia. The title refers to an enormous planet …

At long last, the cult series Millenium may be paying a visit to the big screen.  The show was one of the darkest series in both subject matter and texture to ever grace television screens.  It was very stylized, with a neo-gothic colour palette.  Key to the series was Lance Henriksen, who starred as Frank …

On and offscreen couple Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer will no doubt glamour True Blood fans into viewing their new project Open House, a thriller that according to Dread Central is about a young and wealthy couple hosting an open house to sell off their estate only to find that one of their guests never …

According to Comics2Film at Mania.com, director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9) is set to direct a feature based on the 128 page epic and terrifying  graphic novel by Robert Tinnell and Todd Livngston, the creators of The Black Forest and The Wicked West. Brad Anderson who has become known for his work on edgy …

Paranormal Activity Directed by Oren Peli There’s nothing more terrifying than things that go bump in the night while we lay awake helpless under our bedsheets.  Writer-director Oren Peli obviously recognizes this, as he expertly exploits this fear to create the genuinely frightful paranormal thriller Paranormal Activity. Adding to the fear factor, Paranormal Activity opens …

Fausta: La Teta Asustada / The Milk of Sorrow Spain, Peru, 2009 Director: Claudia Llosa Writer: Claudia Llosa Fausta is a young woman afflicted with a rare disease. The milk of Sorrow, passed on to her through her mother’s breast milk, affects the children born to women tortured and raped during Peru’s terrorist era. Frightened …