Australian Cinema has never been content to tell a normal story. It finds the weird, the beatific, and the controversial in all it looks at. What was Peter Weir’s mind frame when in 1971, he shot a film in his own house on a remote island near Sydney where several visitors arrive at the expensive guest house and are forced… Read more »
‘Body-Horror’ is a sub-genre which primarily focuses on the destruction, deformation or infiltration of the human body in various forms. Whether it be by spreading diseases, scientific or medical experimentations, technological impulses or anything else the imagination of the filmmakers can muster – the various methods of decay of the human body can serve as an abundance of metaphors given… Read more »
The recent downfall of the video store and the rise of Netflix and online streaming have left a crucial element to the browsing experience in the dust. No longer can you talk to the knowledgeable and somewhat film nerdy guy behind the counter about what’s good or what’s not. The “five star” Netflix rating system gives a decent overview but… Read more »
San Francisco’s rolling hills, fog and bridges have called out to Hollywood filmmakers for years, and many of them have ventured north the three hundred miles or so to shoot their films in ‘Baghdad by the Bay’. Here is a list of the 20 most memorable films with settings in San Francisco. I tried to favor films that were set… Read more »
More commonly today seen as a cheap ploy in horror movies, the hand held camera technique can be an effective cinematography style. Before the days of “Cloverfield” and “The Blair Witch Project” the “shaky camera” motif used by directors was innovative and ground breaking. Difficult to master yet chronically abused, this style is exemplified in films from documentaries to Avant-Garde… Read more »
The music can sometimes MAKE the movie. Think about a film like Jaws, or for that matter any film scored by John Williams. Think about horror movies. Would anyone consider Psycho a classic if not for the music during the infamous shower scene? Imagine Halloween without John Carpenter’s creepy tune. We leave the theatres humming the tunes and they stay… Read more »
Both horror and comedy are some of film’s oldest and well-loved genres. It comes as no surprise then that the two merged really early on, just as they had done previously in literature. Examples of the horror-comedy hybrid genre in film can be found as far back as the early nineteen hundreds. It wasn’t until in the thirties that horror-comedies… Read more »
Silent film is the first 35 years of film history, a record starting over a hundred years ago of human endeavor, a complex negotiation between art and commerce, and a union of creativity and technology. It contains many the genres we would recognize from later sound films and some of its own. Nearly every important aspect of film – its… Read more »
In the early sixties, audiences across the country were shocked, disgusted and mesmerized by a new movement later given the name Mondo Films. Mondo refers to films dealing with strange, ritualistic subject matter from around the world. This was everything from live insect jewelry, an annual celebration in which men smash in a garage door using their heads, religious fanatics… Read more »
If you’re a young filmmaker with an urge to make horror films, don’t let anyone dismiss you and say it’s wrong; some of the finest filmmakers have cut their teeth in the blood-soaked genre of horror. One of the most notable is horror auteur turned blockbuster filmmaker Sam Raimi. “The Evil Dead” was Raimi’s feature debut as a filmmaker and… Read more »
Alfred Hitchcock made cameos in all of his American (1940 and later) films and many of his British films. But in his British films, the cameos are either non-existent or very obscure, although some (as in Blackmail) are quite easy to spot. For the purposes of this list, I have focused on the films from Rebecca (1940) onwards, that Hitchcock… Read more »
Short filmmaking has always been an understated component of cinema. It contains all of the magic, escapism, and even technicality that goes into making full length feature productions. In fact some may argue that it is even more difficult to master given the short amount of time that one has to work with to get all of the aspects of… Read more »
Many African films that remain popular deal with the parallels between Africa’s past in relations to its modern present state. From this, we view a wide range of topics such as traditions, ideological and political institutions that were set by colonizers which remain long after their dissolution, gender roles, and the significance of oral narratives and language. The films created… Read more »
Here are 11 films which often inspire discomfort within the audience in different degrees and ways; a vague term perhaps, but most of the entries on the list manage to actually be discomforting without always having to rely on overtly violent, gory or sexually explicit scenes. None of the films could be categorically defined as clear-cut horror films and it… Read more »
As this is written Matthew McConaughey is perhaps the most marketable male actor around. To say he has had a renaissance or McConaissance is already a dated claim. So what this list aims to do is give you a broad picture of the different types of performances the actor has given across his career and the best of them. This… Read more »
By watching many movies, genre tendencies become expected. When you sit down to watch a baseball movie, or a basic romantic comedy, the outcome is often pretty predictable, and the film itself is reliably formulaic. In many genre movies we welcome this predictability and these clichés, as they’re what’s expected and what you want to see. Some films however, deviate… Read more »
The 1980′s were a time of innovation and progress for science fiction films. The groundwork that had been laid in the late ’60′s with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and later in the ’70′s with Star Wars and Alien, allowed for leaps and bounds in the following decade in terms of storytelling, special effects, and subject matter. Many sci-fi films were… Read more »
In case you weren’t already aware, our fragile little minds are very easily corruptible. The vaguest notion of sex or violence in film and we’re all of a flutter. Therefore, we need censorship to keep us sane. But sometimes film censors gets a little bit out of hand. They get power-hungry and go around banishing whatever they see fit. Here… Read more »
Not all great films are complicated, convoluted and stuffed with details, characters and visual grandiose. Some movies force you to look deeper and find those complexities and themes in undercurrents and symbolic motifs, while on the surface the film itself appears to be quite simple. Simplicity in film can be beautiful and poetic, and without a complicated plot or frenzied… Read more »
