This heartwarming, humanist and gender-blurring pic about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be his most accomplished work.
All About My Mother
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
With All About My Mother, Pedro Almodovar shifts away from his earlier, more kinky and offbeat views of sex and relationships. Here, he is more concerned about conventional film elements and [...]
A delirious cocktail of satire, sex, music, murder and cod-Shakespearean dialogue, Russ Meyer’s cult classic is a blast from its pistol-in-the-mouth start to its tongue-in-cheek finish. Even if you’ve never seen a Meyer film and don’t share his predilection for buxom ladies with limited acting skills, the story of an all-girl rock group in Hollywood [...]
Black Dynamite
Directed by Scott Sanders
Michael Jai White is Black Dynamite, the legendary gun-toting, two-fisted, Afro-wearing Vietnam vet, now a legendary ghetto hero. In the course of investigating his brother’s death, Dynamite stumbles on a plot to compromise “black manhood” with a secret weapon disguised as malt liquor. Set in 1972, the film follows our hero [...]
You Can’t Stop Progress.
Hardware
Directed by Richard Stanley
In a post-apocalyptic future somewhere in a radioactive desert, terminally ill Moses Baxter (Dylan McDermott) has just returned from scavenging for whatever waste he may find that could be of use to him either back home or for sale. Along his journey he discovers some robotic parts from some [...]
Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
Directed by Giorgos Lanthimos
Currently touring the festival circuit is a bizarre Greek film called Dogtooth, the third feature by writer, director, and producer Giorgos Lanthimos. Its plot could be likened to that of American Gothic, focusing on a family living in a large, secluded house. The parents have never allowed their two daughters and [...]
The House of the Devil is at heart an exercise in tension, and West and Donahue deserve serious credit for stringing the audience along while revealing little of the horror to come.
Ti West
I can’t yet speak to Ti West’s 21st century output, but with The House of the Devil West has proven [...]
Love Exposure is often gratuitous, low-brow, and even tasteless–you will never again see as many shots of young girl’s panties in one place–but is also sneakily poignant.
Directed by Shion Sono
Sion Sono’s new film covers a lot of territory. It’s a romance, a revenge tale, a heartbreaking tragedy, a truly zany comedy, a blood-splattered action [...]
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Directed by Werner Herzog
Respected iconoclastic auteurs Werner Herzog and David Lynch collaborate on this drama, with Herzog as director and Lynch as executive producer. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is inspired by the harrowing true story of Mark Yarovsky (Michael Shannon), a graduate student at [...]
The Loved Ones
Directed by Sean Byrne
Sean Byrne’s debut feature, The Loved Ones, crosses various horror touchstones, touching on teen angst, torture porn, melodrama and conventional slasher tropes. It’s a gore-filled shocker that goes for laughs by paying homage to the outlandish low-budget video nasties of the ’70s and ’80s, blending together Misery, Saw, Prom Night, [...]
BRONSON (cue “Digital Versicolor” by Glass Candy)
While non-Americans win very few of the top acting awards at the Oscars, we see it happen from time to time (Daniel Day-Lewis, Roberto Benigni, etc). As a result, I’d love to see Tom Hardy, the English actor who brilliantly portrays Michael Gordon Pederson in [...]
Black Dynamite
Directed by Scott Sanders
Although director Scott Sanders’ Black Dynamite is being touted as a brazen spoof of 70’s blaxploitation films, its tone is less ’spoof ‘ than it is simply tongue-in-cheek. Yes, there are pimps, pushers, ho’s, nunchucks, polyester suits and 8-track tapes, but Sanders does not rely on [...]
Grace
Directed by Paul Solet
Joining the (surprisingly long) list of evil baby horror films is Paul Solet’s Grace, a chilling and often disturbing picture with a great amount of imagination. From Rosemary’s Baby to It’s Alive, this particular sub-genre isn’t anything new in horror, but Grace does more for the genre than most give it credit. [...]
Inglorious Bastards
Directed by Enzo Castellari
When Tarantino opened the retrospective ‘The Italian King of B’s’ at the 2004 Venice Biennale with Joe Dante, he publicly declared his love for Italian B-cinema of the 60s and 70s, helping to shine a spotlight on many forgotten gems of Italian genre/exploitation cinema including The Inglorious Bastards. Also known under [...]
House of the Devil
Directed by Ti West
****
New York horror director Ti West (The Roost, Trigger Man) makes it clear in his new project The House of the Devil, that he is a fan of the conventions of 1980s horror. House of the Devil hearkens back to the days of late 70s grindhouse cinema, complete with [...]
Sound on Sight co-host Al Kratina is covering Fantasia for the Montreal Gazette’s Cine Files blog. Read an excerpt below.
Black
Directed by Pierre Laffargue
It must be difficult to do anything original with the urban crime drama, since most of the more familiar tropes have migrated from gritty 1970s cult films to G Unit videos and [...]
