The Uninvited (1944) was one of the first American movies to treat the ghost story seriously. Until then, ghosts were either played for comedy, or were deceptions cooked up as part of some criminal scheme, or they were used metaphorically or symbolically. But the idea that the actual spirits of the dead might linger on […]
When approaching 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, Criterion’s new 5-disk DVD edition of the first three collaborations between the Italian filmmaker and the Hollywood star, it’s difficult not to feel a certain degree of trepidation. These three films, critical and commercial failures at the time of release, now stand as something like […]
While Death Hunt is an enjoyable outdoor adventure, it plays fast & loose with history, transforming northern Canada into a facsimile of the American west
I’ve been a fan of Shintaro Katsu’s series of films about Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, since I came across Home Vision Entertainment’s DVD editions of the first two, The Tale of Zatoichi and The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (both 1962) many years ago in the video department of Winnipeg’s long-gone A&B Sound. I was grabbed […]
I was a fan of Edgar G. Ulmer before I had any idea who he was. Sometime back in the ’70s, I saw The Black Cat (1934) on television and it became, and remained, my favourite classic Universal horror film. As much as I like the others (particularly the witty work of James Whale), the […]
When I was working on my documentary about Winnipeg movie theatres, I spent hours and hours at the library going through old newspapers on microfilm, looking at movie ads. It was remarkable how strong the pull of those ads was – partly, no doubt, because of the associations with films which have long become a […]
Guillermo del Toro, who made his start – after a couple of shorts and some TV work – with the strikingly original Cronos (1993), has subsequently split his time between small, personal Spanish-language horror fantasies and increasingly big budget Hollywood productions. Along the way, he has become a major force in contemporary genre cinema – […]
As my friend Curtis and I both despised what J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and their team did to Star Trek with their “re-boot” (more like a boot to the original’s crotch) in 2009, it would be fair to ask why the heck we decided to go and see the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness, on […]
A friend who teaches film to university students occasionally offers a course in comedy. He’d originally thought it would be fun, but was quickly disillusioned. Of course, comedy, more than drama, tends to be specific to its context as jokes are frequently dependent on shared cultural referents. So these student fans of Adam Sandler, American […]
As Felix Unger was fond of saying in The Odd Couple, “When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.” Based on my experience of Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous films, which have been equal parts exhilarating and irritating, I didn’t bother to go and see The Master, which despite a lot of […]