No one really knows when from where inspiration will strike. An innocuous action, a stray thought, a random observation — anything is ripe for seeding a new concept or approach. For writer/director/actor John Krasinski (A Quiet Place), inspiration for his… Read More ›
Month: August 2024
Beyond Thunderdome, beyond vengeance, lies “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” on home video.
Filmmaker Dr. George Miller’s been entertaining audiences for nearly 40 years, either with tales of desperation (Mad Max (1979)), tales of greed (The Witches of Eastwick (1987)), or tales of hope (Happy Feet Two (2011)), to name a few. In… Read More ›
Crime anthology “The Killers” exudes undeniable collective charm. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
Anthology stories come in all shapes and sizes. They can be horror-based, like Satanic Hispanics (2022) or Tiny Cinema (2022); offer a western twang, like The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018); or they can be mission-oriented, like Give Me an… Read More ›
“Oddity” firmly establishes its terrifying place in a horror-rich year. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
I do not consider myself someone who scares easily. Sure, a jump scare may get to me and make me uneasy, but it takes a lot to shake me to my utter core and have me wincing and nearly looking… Read More ›
“IF” 4K UHD Blu-ray Giveaway
At some point in our lives, we lose the magic of our youth. The wide-eyed optimism is shuttered by age, experience, and, possibly, being told “no” by life too many times. Perhaps to help battle this, writer/director John Krasinski developed… Read More ›
Witness the end of the Tomorrowverse as Warner Bros. Animation’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” concludes with “Part Three.”
Within the home release of Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Part One, the featurette “Crisis Prime(r)” lays out how just how long the plan for Crisis on Infinite Earths had been in the works, detailing that each film… Read More ›
GKIDS Films’s “The Boy and the Heron” reveals itself on home video in 4K.
In the months since the winter release of The Boy and the Heron (2023), the following events have clarified the meaning and depth of this inscrutable film in my mind: The Megalopolis (2024) trailer, the Supreme Court’s sweeping theft of… Read More ›
Sony Pictures Classics gives Tom Tykwer’s romantic thriller “Run Lola Run” its own 4K UHD release.
Before American audiences met Franka Potente as Marie, the accidental ally to amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) in 2002, she portrayed a different type of “on-the-run” character: Lola. Absent intrigue of the spy sort, Potente’s Lola is a strong… Read More ›
“The Silent Planet” tells a very human story on a very isolated space rock. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
As someone who was/is a big fan of Jeffrey St. Jules’s first feature, Bang Bang Baby (2014), I was excited, to say the least, to see that he had a new feature called The Silent Planet with a premise that… Read More ›
“Dead Dead Full Dead” slays with laughter as a genre mashup. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
Comedies are always subjective. Sometimes we discover that the films we’re used to are not as good as we thought as we get exposed to so many different cultures bringing their own unique looks and flare to films. Pratul Gaikwad’s… Read More ›
“The Dead Thing” is pitch-perfect horror set in the world of online dating. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
The dating scene has always been rather bleak. This is not news. With the creation of “dating” apps, the odds of meeting someone this way and it working were always slim and bleak. I haven’t had to be out there… Read More ›
Director Soi Cheang’s “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” incorporates elements of new school and old school Hong Kong cinema which rattle audiences’ bones and souls in equal measure. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
Every community has its stories — tales of victories and defeats, of perilous ends and new beginnings, and of the old guard and the new. Sometimes these take the form of myths and legends born from imagination and other times… Read More ›
Within the weird and zany world of “Ghost Cat Anzu” lies a bittersweet story of broken hearts searching for healing. [Fantasia International Film Festival]
In Japanese folklore, there exists what’s known as “kaibyō,” a cat that possesses supernatural properties. Of the three types within kaibyō — bakeneko, maneki-neko, and nekomata — manga creator Imashiro Takashi took inspiration from the bakeneko type for his series… Read More ›