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 »
When you say “foreign film” or “world cinema”, most people (at least some of the people who live in the United States) immediately think of a French or Italian film, or maybe a Japanese animation. Seldom do people think of Latin America. And it could be argued that this is because the output of films in Latin America has always… Read more »
The high school movie is an American cinema staple, consisting of great classics from the likes of American Graffiti, John Hughes’ “brat-pack” films (The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Dazed and Confused and many others. This cinema tradition continues to this day, with movies such as Juno and The Perks of Being a Wall Flower making a big impression… Read more »
The great thing about art is how it can be interpreted in different ways. There’s nothing better than looking at a piece of art such as a painting or novel and walking away with something in mind about what it means to you. Each person sees art in different ways. Some may like it and some may not. Either way,… Read more »
Good news for all Stanley Kubrick fans! There is a new documentary which is about the making of the masks in Eyes Wide Shut. In Kubrick’s last masterpiece, Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) wears an androgynous mask, as its creator Franco Cecamore specifically intended. This reinforces the theme that Dr Harford’s increasingly ambiguous relationship with his sexuality, spawned… Read more »
Candy-colored, boisterous, lush, lurid—all words that have been used to describe the various effects, moods, and sensations of Technicolor. For the first half of cinema’s first century, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation had a monopoly on color filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. Requiring three separate negatives, the Technicolor method involved filtering light through a double-prism beam splitter to produce magenta… Read more »
The concept of remaking a film is an interesting one to think about. Is it respectful to the original’s legacy, or disrespectful? Remakes really vary in quality – some are great, even better than the original source material, and then some are just awful – insulting, and just plain disrespectful to the original. Some stories are so classic that they… Read more »
Darren Aronofsky’s latest film Noah hits theaters on March 28th. Predictably, the film has already garnered lots of controversy, before it’s even out; three Middle Eastern countries have banned it, Christian groups have threatened to boycott it, test-screening have resulted in troubling reactions, and Aronofsky has been struggling for his artistic rights with Paramount since the beginning. Despite the fact… Read more »
Film is an art form which combines many various disciplines and a good film is not necessarily a film that looks good. But there is no denying that film is first and foremost a visual medium and that making your movies look beautiful can never really be a bad thing. Below you will find twenty directors who all have made… Read more »
Few would argue that the past decade’s constant stream of horror film remakes has not been detrimental to the genre as whole. The vast majority of these remakes are completely unnecessary and while there is absolutely no substitute for genuine creativity or fresh takes on horror material, bright spots do exist in the field. Classics like Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the… Read more »
