Split Second came at a time when it seemed like there would be a British vanguard of sci-fi action movies. There was something about their Britishness that set them apart from similar films, a feeling that they’d been ripped from the pages of the UK's venerable 2000AD comic.
Read More »Larry Cohen Knows: Interpreting The Invaders (1967-1968) for Our Troubled Modern Times
Even if you open your window to the sounds of birds tweeting or a gentle breeze rustling through the leaves of trees outside, you know it’s a temporary lull because the world out there is beyond crazy. We have unqualified ...
Read More »Taking a Bizarre Walk through Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005)
2005 brought us Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005), a completely over-the-top film full of humor, surrealist body horror and… dancing. Three directors—Katsuhito Ishii, Hajime Ishimine, and Shunichiro Miki—combined their warped visions to manifest a final product that is incomprehensible in ...
Read More »BUFF: Hidden Reserves (2016)
When you can’t count on death… an impossible sentence to finish, but that is what the world has sunk to in Stille Reserven (Hidden Reserves, 2016), a movie that considers the conditions necessary to make people spend their whole life ...
Read More »Interview with Film Movement on Kamikaze ’89
While German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder is generally remembered for his prolific output as a filmmaker, writer, and theater director, he was just as compelling in front of the camera. Though the majority of his performances were for his own ...
Read More »An Andrzej Żuławski Retrospective: On the Silver Globe
This is the third entry in a four part series on director Andrzej Żuławski’s recently restored early Polish films — Trzecia częśc nocy (1971) aka The Third Part of the Night, Diabel (1972) aka The Devil, and Na srebrnym globie ...
Read More »Woman in the Moon (US Blu-ray review)
By 1929, director Fritz Lang was winding towards the end of his prolific period of silent filmmaking for UFA in the Weimar Republic. He had already explored a number of genres, including fantasy (Halbblut, Der müde Tod, and Die Nibelungen), ...
Read More »Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (Film Review)
Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau (2014) is one of those few “making of” documentaries that tells a genuinely interesting story. The circumstances surrounding and major players involved in the filming of The Island of Dr. ...
Read More »Japan Cuts 2015
For cinephiles who live in or near New York City and are interested in seeing an intriguing blend of contemporary and restored Japanese films, Japan Cuts is the festival for you. Belladonna of Sadness (1973) and Strayer’s Chronicle (2015) will likely be of particular interest for readers ...
Read More »It! The Terror from Beyond Space (Blu-ray Review)
Introduction It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) stands up as a quality science-fiction classic that influenced the future of the genre, even though audiences seldom mention it in the same breath as more popular classics such as Forbidden Planet (1956) or The ...
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