In light of this week’s post on Matthew J. Avant’s “found footage documentary” Lunopolis, it seems like fortuitous timing that Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant has just passed on a couple of links dealing with Les documents interdits, a series of found-footage shorts by French filmmaker Jean-Teddy Filippe. For anyone who enjoys the form, […]
There are two main types of time travel story. The first treats time as little more than another spatial dimension, with the traveler heading off to see something in the past or future as if going to another country. H.G Wells’ The Time Machine was of this type, the title machine essentially just a device […]
Criterion’s recent Blu-ray release of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) spurred me to watch the film again for the first time in almost a decade. I originally saw Solaris in London in 1975, my initial experience of Tarkovsky, and while I now recognize that it’s not his best work, I was enthralled. I’ve always liked films […]
British TV has always been primarily a writer’s medium; since the ’50s, the biggest stars have tended to be the writers, with writers’ names attached possessively to projects. Television production was often built around writers such as Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, who was one of the biggest, with each of his new […]
John Carpenter has had a long, uneven career, the chief foundation of which (after a couple of very good small features, Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13) was the highly successful and influential Halloween. Personally, I’ve never understood that movie’s reputation and success. Apart from his facility with the widescreen frame and a strong […]
In my rather long film-going life, I have often been out of sync with generally held opinions. I didn’t much like the Star Wars movies when they transformed popular culture, I found myself laughing at Titanic while surrounded in a crowded theatre by sniffling people who bought into it completely … So it doesn’t surprise […]
Many of us who live in relative urban comfort enjoy experiencing a vicarious struggle for survival through books and movies. This goes back at least as far as 1719 and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (how many times has that been filmed?). Crusoe, like many wilderness narratives, focuses on an individual separated from society, having to […]
It was unfortunate that until the very end of his career, the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku was known in North America mostly for his worst film: The Green Slime. This was an “international” production, shot in Japanese studios with an American and European cast, a very bad script and even worse special effects. But even […]
I was recently rooting through a stack of boxes in my mother’s basement and came across my old collection of Cinefantastique magazines. I can’t recall exactly how I first heard about it – I think it might have been a brief announcement by Baird Searles in his occasional movie column in The Magazine of Fantasy […]