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It Was a Dark and Stormy Night….
This one sentence synopsis should sound familiar. A group of travelers are stranded during a severe storm at a creepy mansion where the hosts are the most unsettling part of the experience. It’s an...
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Divine Intervention
A political allegory that was one of the first films to openly address the problems resulting from the Great Depression, Gabriel Over the White House (1933), directed by Gregory La Cava, takes on such...
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Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting
Krzysztof Kieslowski placed it on his Top Ten list for a Sight & Sound magazine poll. Dave Kehr, formerly of The Chicago Reader, called it “one of the finest works of the short-lived Czech New...
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Diary of a Mad Prairie Housewife
Every once in a while a film comes along that doesn’t conform to the expectations of its designated genre. A case in point is Emma Tammi’s debut feature The Wind (2018) from a screenplay by Teresa...
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Rene Clair’s Prophetic Fantasy
Film scholars generally agree that the silent era offerings (Entr’acte, Le Voyage Imaginaire) and early sound films of Rene Clair (Under the Roofs of Paris, Le Million) are the French...
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Robert Frank and The Rolling Stones
Photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank (left) and Mick Jagger (right) on The Rolling Stones’ private jet during their 1972 tour of the U.S. to promote the album “Exile on Main Street” as depicted in the...
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The Dogs of War
The title Werewolf invokes, especially among movie fans, images from the 1941 Universal horror classic The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr. and other descendants from that line like The Curse of the...
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Mad Men Heyday
Matthew Weiner, the creator of AMC’s popular Mad Men franchise, has often pointed to specific films that influenced the look and feel of that popular TV series. Among them are obvious choices like...
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Labor Pains
When cinema buffs talk about their favorite movies from that brief period known as the “angry young man” phase of the British New Wave movement, one title is usually overlooked – The Angry Silence...
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Bowling, Pizza and Small Town Dreamers
Gary Lundgren is a writer/director who has been making feature films since 2009 but you might not have heard of him unless you came across one of his movies at a film festival. Despite a lack of...
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The Japanese Sinbad
Most moviegoers know Toshiro Mifune from his long and fruitful association with director Akira Kurosawa, most prominently Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, and a handful of major works from other...
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Irene Dunne in a Sinclair Lewis World
Among the many film adaptations of Sinclair Lewis novels over the years, Ann Vickers (1933) is probably the least known of them all, and, it wasn’t among the most popular or critically acclaimed of...
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A Childhood on the Run
Kaim Alizadeh plays a 14 year old orphan on the run from border guards in Afghanistan in Delbaran (2001) from Iranian director Abolfazl Jalili. Although released in 2001 and greatly admired by many...
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Follow the Money
In an amoral world where everyone is a liar, cheat, assassin or ruthless opportunist, can there be any heroes? It all comes down to a matter of charisma and underdog appeal in West German director...
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Gloom and Doom in Snowdonia
After winning the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature at the 2019 Edinburgh International Film Festival and various other accolades in Europe, William McGregor’s debut feature Gwen is opening...
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The Legend of Black Tiger
Chartchai Ngamsan stars as Thailand gunslinger Dum aka Black Tiger in the 2000 cult film, Tears of the Black Tiger. When it first appeared in 2000, Tears of the Black Tiger (aka Fah Talai Jone), became...
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Cagney & Blondell: Made for Each Other
Could there have been a more ideally matched couple from the Warner Bros. stock company than this pair of New York natives with their street-smart ways and attitudes to match? It seems strange that...
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The Macedonian Beekeeper
Imagine living in a remote area where there is no running water or electricity. There are also no established roads or available food nearby or even much protection from extreme temperatures in the...
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Nicholas Ray’s Gender Bender Western
In the fifties, the Western genre experienced a revitalization that saw new approaches to the form – everything from a film noir interpretation like The Furies (1950) to a psychological thriller like...
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From Graphic Novel to Animated Feature: The Making of Luis Bunuel’s Las Hurdes
Gkids is a New York based film distributor that represents Japan’s famous Studio Ghibli with such family-friendly animation features as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) as...
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