Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]
I usually only have time to write once a week for this blog, and my occasional obligations to Blogcritics (i.e. the free review copies I get through them) have pushed me into the habit of doing reviews more often than more general posts about broader topics (which was what I actually anticipated when I started […]
After three years of steady releases, for some reason the BFI suspended their Flipside series last May. Now, after an eleven month break, they’ve released two new titles, as unexpected as anything which has come before. In John Krish, they’ve returned to a filmmaker familiar from a number of previous BFI releases, while in B.S. […]
Basil Dearden’s The Bells Go Down, which I wrote about last week, is just one of a number of disks I recently received from England. Maybe it’s a bit of nostalgia, but the past few years I’ve been digging back into British film – partly seeking out titles I have memories of from long ago, […]
In the past few years, something interesting has been happening in the horror genre. After several decades of increasingly graphic movies focused on the torture and destruction of the human body, something more subtle has been re-emerging. Like it or not, one of the key instigators of the trend was The Blair Witch Project (1999); […]
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) I watched Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild just before it landed several Oscar nominations, and my reaction was quite mixed. The film has an impressive visceral power, anchored by the remarkable performance of 5-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy, the determined little girl who lives in […]
Michael Winner, who died on Monday, didn’t get a lot of respect as a filmmaker. Best known for his Death Wish movies and other violent thrillers starring Charles Bronson, he seemed like a crass commercial opportunist. The Death Wish films, particularly the first, were efficient appeals to the audience’s baser instincts, which, like Clint Eastwood’s […]
One of the things I like about Criterion’s Eclipse series is the lack of snobbery in their choices. Yes, there are serious selections like the early Ozu films and Naruse’s silent works, Louis Malle’s documentaries, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s trilogy of essay films and the early Bergmans … but the people behind the line have shown a […]
Released simultaneously with the Andy Milligan double-bill Nightbirds and The Body Beneath, the BFI Flipside edition of Ian Merrick’s The Black Panther (1977) resurrects an essentially lost British film which suffered a quick death because it took as subject something too raw for British audiences (or at least the British press) to tolerate. Merrick had […]
There’s far more stuff in the world than any of us can ever have complete first-hand knowledge of, so we often have to rely on second- and third-hand information about things we haven’t yet encountered. This leads to a tendency to form opinions about things we actually know nothing about … and judging by a […]