OK, I know I said I was gonna post once a day about these old school films (which I still am), but I got caught up having to make a two day trip to San Francisco...I'm sorry, but I DO NOT miss living there....my hometown is falling to pieces on a non-tourist
Hideo Gosha's Sword of the Beast is a harsh, cynical samurai movie that questions the assumptions of the often glamorized samurai code. Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira) is an outcast samurai betrayed by his superiors, tricked into killing a political leader
I've written a piece about Derek Jarman's book At Your Own Risk (recently republished by the University of Minnesota along with some of the director's other writings) over at The House Next Door. The first paragraph is excerpted below; follow the link
Alexander Kluge's Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave is a film that probes just how difficult it is to understand the complex workings of politics and society, and to make a difference, when society and its structures are designed to eat up so much of
After watching a series of groan inducing "just why?" films like boiling hot mess "Armored" and the wretched "The Losers", it was quite refreshing to have a film like "Chameleon Street" thrown into the mix. Reader Tafari summed my current Black Cinema
Hey all. I think I'm finally over my twitter obsession and can get back to blogging. Well, that's not entirely accurate. I know I said I wanted to start blogging regularly as a tribute to David Mills, but the biggest truth is that I've been uninspired.
Joon-ho Bong's The Host is a delirious modern monster movie, a throwback to the classic era of the sci-fi monster: all those nakedly metaphorical beasts formed from radiation or other side effects of man's scientific progress. And much like the classic
The Company is a weird project for Robert Altman to undertake: a ballet drama conceived entirely by actress Neve Campbell as a showcase for her own interest and background in dance. Campbell wrote the script with screenwriter Barbara Turner, and brought
The Coen brothers' latest film, A Serious Man, is one of the duo's most challenging and confounding works — challenging in the sense that it continually defies interpretation, and perhaps even suggests that interpretation, the search for answers, is
Don Siegel's The Lineup is an interesting noir with an unusual structure, starting with the cops investigating the death of a cop during a drug smuggling ploy gone wrong, then midway through making a pair of out-of-town killers the protagonists instead.
I Was Born, But... is an utterly charming, hilarious silent comedy of childhood by Yasujiro Ozu, displaying the lighter, more playful side of his sensibility. The film concerns itself almost exclusively with the child's point of view, focusing on the
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a powerful, crisply made action movie about a military bomb squad working in Iraq. William James (Jeremy Renner) is the new leader of the squad, replacing the former sergeant who's blown up by a roadside bomb in the
With Nuits rouges, Georges Franju returned to the territory of Louis Feuillade, whose adventure serials also provided the inspiration for Franju's 1963 Judex. Made a decade later, Nuits rouges is far wilder, more garish and absurd, than its predecessor:
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