When I was young 3D movies weren’t so popular and horror movies were considered unworthy of good movie theatres. That didn’t stop me, though. I have seen every horror movie I could find. Sometimes it was a filthy movie theatre where I could smell the restrooms. Other times, it was either too cold or too […]
Year: 2015
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10 Great Films Influenced by The Cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
“Every decent director has only one subject, and finally makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends, it’s a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other” – […]
Observance – VIFF 2015 Review
“Just watch and report back, it’s that simple,” intones the rather tenebrous and passive voice of Parker’s employer over the telephone. Parker (Lindsay Farris) is a rather plebeian private investigator who is a bit of a wreck as of late, owing to the death of his young son and the failed marriage that accrued after […]
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10 Lesser-Known 1960s European Films Worth Your Time
While terrific boutique labels like the Criterion Collection have done wonders to educate the film watching public on many of the heavy hitters of 1960’s European cinema like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, there are still large swathes of the decade that are relatively undiscovered by Western audiences. The French nouvelle vague has reached household […]
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon – VIFF 2015 Review
Refracted through a wistfully nostalgic lens, Douglas Triola’s wonderfully titled documentary, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, is an entertaining and often aggrandizing look back at the once popular publication. Fans of the now defunct satirical counterculture magazine that reached its zenith in the 1970s, and fizzled out by the late […]
Slackjaw – VIFF 2015 Review
What begins as a baffling yet amusing string of non sequitur vignettes, shot rough and strenuous in a camera-verite fashion, eventually and astonishingly is made coherent in Zach Weintraub’s audacious arthouse alternative, Slackjaw. Something of an anomaly on the American indie scene, Weintraub (Bummer Summer, You Make Me Feel So Young) delights in awkward social […]