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EYE – Film Archive of the Future
On a recent November trip to Amsterdam with my wife, we had no set agenda other than pure pleasure – to soak in the culture, see the city sights and various art museums, tour the canals and...
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Rififi in Tokyo
Rififi in Tokyo poster RIFIFI, Jules Dassin’s quintessential 1955 noir/heist thriller, had quite an impact on the European crime movie genre in its day though most of its imitators or similarly...
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CINEMATEK in Brussels – Enter The Sacred Film Shrine
Photography by Wouter Spitters Prior to traveling to Brussels, Belgium this past November, I put some serious research time into identifying the key sights and activities I wanted to see and do while...
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Hitchhike Into Darkness: Tomorrow is Another Day
Publicity still from TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY (1951) with Ruth Roman & Steve Cochran Released in 1951 by Warner Bros. and often considered a film noir by some film buffs and critics, the little...
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What’s So Funny About a Clown With a Machete?
The Last Circus (2010) by Alex de la Iglesia When clowns are the main characters in movies, you can almost bet they aren’t going to be very funny (He Who Gets Slapped, La Strada, The Comic)…especially...
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Faded Delusions of Grandeur: The Desert of the Tartars
Each year hundreds of international films never get picked up for distribution in the U.S. and the select few that do are either high profile film festival prize winners like Michael Haneke’s Amour...
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Missing in Action: Birds in Peru Starring Jean Seberg
Jean Seberg in Birds in Peru (1968) There is a popular misconception these days that almost any movie you want to see is available for streaming or viewing somewhere in cyberspace but that simply isn’t...
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Golden Salamander: Treasure and Death in Tunisia
Though relatively unknown today, Golden Salamander (1950), Ronald Neame’s second directorial effort, is one of those unexpected but welcome cinema excursions that actually delivers on its exotic title....
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Silence of the Lamb
First person narration in films can be a tricky proposition. Not only can it become monotonous but it can also work against the visual storytelling, imposing a structure on the film that frustrates the...
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Roman Polanski’s Lost Film
The headline is referencing the past, not the present, for A DAY AT THE BEACH, a film that Roman Polanski scripted and co-produced with his partner Gene Gutowski for their short-lived production...
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…And Bob Dylan Plays a Chairsaw-Wielding Conceptual Artist.
Bob Dylan in Backtrack aka Catchfire (1990) Sometimes the casting in a film is so peculiar and unique that you feel compelled to take a chance on it no matter how many negative things you’ve heard...
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Les Blank, 1935-2013
The prolific independent filmmaker Les Blank died on April 7, 2013 but somehow that sad news slipped past me. I’m just now reading a host of glowing eulogies and tributes to the man, mostly from fellow...
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The Deconstructed Honeymoon
A newlywed couple’s road trip into the countryside grows stranger and stranger and then a deranged Michael J. Pollard shows up, wandering out of the wilderness and clutching a stolen wedding dress....
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My Visit to Forry’s Ackermansion
Forry Ackerman in his guest room at the Ackermansion (1998) photo by J.Stafford I never would have imagined when I was a geeky eleven year old kid hooked on Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine that I...
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Running on Empty
Owen Wilson in The Minus Man (1999) “Once when I was young I was lying in the grass and a spider crawled in my ear…and it crawled out again. Nobody home.” – Vann Siegert The depiction of serial killers...
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Oswald’s Last Picture Show
The premiere of the documentary OSWALD’S GHOST at the Texas Theatre in 2007 50 years ago today Lee Harvey Oswald ran into the Texas Theatre in Dallas to hide after shooting police officer J.D. Tippit....
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Le Joli Mai and more at the Virginia Film Festival (VFF), 2013
Now in its 26th year, the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville might not enjoy the high profile of Sundance or Telluride but that’s actually to its credit. While the latter festivals continue to...
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Gloria, How’s It Gonna Go Down?
Paulina Garcia dancing to her theme song in Gloria (2013) This woman is being transported to someplace we can’t see by “Gloria,” the original Italian version of the pop tune by Umberto Tozzi and...
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Brain Candy for the Cinephile
Following the same format and stylized approach they used in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, director Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph and Joseph Fiennes) and theorist/cultural critic Slovoj Zizek are...
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Pitch Black Noir
A contemporary film noir set in an economically depressed backwoods town, A Single Shot comes with impressive credentials – cinematography by Eduard Grau (A Single Man, Buried), production design by...
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