Mastering the Multiverse –Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

By Matthew Sorrento. It’s invigorating to see a broad entertainment reach the heights of cinema’s visual potential.” While preparing the classic horror comedy Re-Animator, producer Brian Yunza had his director Stuart Gordon and other team members sit for a marathon VHS film festival of recent horror. The purpose: to top […]

Lawrence Tierney: Face of a Cop Hater (Preview)

By Burt Kearns. Tierney is another picture altogether…. He is a man who has had his head handed to him.” Lawrence Tierney was twenty-six years old in April 1945, when he became an “overnight sensation” in the title role of the gangster film Dillinger. In the years to follow, his erratic […]

Our Only Physical Carrier: Claire Simon’s Our Body (Notre Corps)

By Yun-hua Chen. A natural continuation of Simon’s perpetual quest to intimately connect with humans in various conditions and manifestations.” From life’s inception to its inevitable conclusion, from the intricate tissues within us to the complexities of our identities, Claire Simon’s Our Body looks into the gynecological experience with remarkable […]

A Picture of Then and Now: Risto Jarva’s Time of Roses (1969)

By Jeremy Carr. A seemingly intact image is a big lie”— This assertively obstruse line comes at the beginning of Time of Roses (Ruusujen Aika), which is itself, particularly at the beginning, a rather obstruse film. But as the picture progresses, the ostensibly elliptical declaration becomes central to what emerges […]

Scared Stiff: Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023)

By James Slaymaker. The prospect of Aster breaking away from the restrictions of a three-act generic formula may initially sound promising, offering Aster the opportunity to liberate his style and delve into more unbridled filmmaking territory; unfortunately, however, Beau is Afraid feels just as airless and over-calculated as the efforts that preceded […]

Notes from Uncanny Valley: Franklin Ritch’s The Artifice Girl (2022)

By Thomas M. Puhr. Franklin Ritch’s feature debut hinges on its ability to make you think you’re watching one kind of movie before becoming another, and then another. If you like cerebral, speculative science-fiction, then you should seek this one out.” The first lines of dialogue in The Artifice Girl […]

The Quiet Girl and Reflections on the Season

By Christopher Sharrett. The conclusion of the film makes a basic point: the biological family is often inauthentic, the authentic family a matter of individual will, with affection created by need, and a deep kinship not often subject to accidents of flesh.” Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl wasn’t ignored during […]

A Woman on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown: Repulsion by Jeremy Carr

A Book Review by Dávid Szőke. A fascinating study that examines themes mostly, but not exclusively, central to feminist visual representations, without losing sight of the paradoxes that shade contemporary approaches to Polanski’s work in the light of the #meToo movement.” “We are clay […] and nothing is real for […]