Before Expend4bles (2023) set him up to take on aged action stars, before Warrior (2019-2023) made him a villain, before audiences worldwide connected with the violent thrill of Indonesian martial arts in cinema, actors Iko Uwasis and Joe Taslim starred… Read More ›
Italian actor, writer, and producer Giuseppe Fiorello (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Terraferma) makes his feature directorial debut with Fireworks (Stranizza d’amuri), an aspirational LGBTQ+ romance that successfully imitates its predecessors in mood and visual style. Set in Sicily in the… Read More ›
Writer/director Park Hoon-jung is not one to shy away from the darkness that exists within humanity (I Saw the Devil) or a hidden world within it (the Witch series). Whether in the bright of day or the shadows of night,… Read More ›
Multigrain, harvest grain, 12 grain, whole grain, there’s a whole lot of grain for everyone. Now, if this irritates you to your core, then you’re probably happy about the reports that the James Cameron restorations look like Madame Tussauds, however,… Read More ›
Restorations are a great way to not only preserve cinema history, they are also a way for films that may have been lost, forgotten, or otherwise kept to a region or country to find new audiences. For 88 Films, specifically… Read More ›
Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) is a contender for the greatest short film of all time. Lamorisse is often overlooked in discussions of the French New Wave, including by his peers, and his other, sparse works, Bim, the Little… Read More ›
January 15th, 1999 — Joey (Katie Holmes) and Dawson (James Van Der Beek) were still an item, Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) was not yet fast nor furious, and, though we knew not to trust Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), the world… Read More ›
The last article I wrote for Elements of Madness, rather ironically, was a 4K home media review of another James Cameron film, Titanic, which hit 4K Blu-ray last month. Now, as if churning out the rest of his catalog and… Read More ›
First hitting Hong Kong theaters with 1986’s action comedy Naughty Boys (扭計雜牌軍), filmmaker Wellson Chin Sing-Wai’s follow up is that of the female-led The Inspector Wears Skirts (霸王花), released as Top Squad in the U.S., has Sibelle Hu (The Seventh… Read More ›
There have always been stories about grifters, liars, and thieves for about as long as there have been heroes and heroines. Sometimes they’re lovable arbiters of chaos, sometimes always in it for themselves. Each time, though, they are often thought… Read More ›
For a certain type of film fan, there’s been a question swirling around in their minds for decades now and it’s centered on writer/director James Cameron. No, it’s not about when the next Avatar entry in the expected five-film series… Read More ›
Memory is a strange thing. It doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order. But now I am not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. – Arrival (2016) In 2019,… Read More ›
Are we the family we’ve come from or the family we create? This is the major question at the center of the Graham and Parker Phillips-helmed Rumble Through The Dark, a drama adapted from the Michael Farris Smith March 2018… Read More ›
Newcomer Anaita Wali Zada’s Donya is desperate for a dream, and, like those who know her, by the second act of Babak Jalali’s (Radio Dreams, Frontier Blues) Fremont, you’ll be desperate for her to find one, too. It’s been a… Read More ›
Movies about finance can be difficult to translate to the big screen. The complicated terminology and history can feel overwhelming to those unfamiliar with that world. The GameStop stock short-squeeze is a prime example of this very thing. It’s a… Read More ›
In today’s theatrical market, making a movie off an established intellectual property (IP) is standard practice. Successful book? Make it a movie. Successful television series? Make it a movie. Successful video game? Keep attempting to make it a movie. Successful… Read More ›
There are movies which, whether you’ve seen them or not, no matter where your cinematic knowledge or pleasures come from, you have knowledge of and the understanding that the film is generally received well. Some of these movies are regarded… Read More ›
“Life is like a parody of your favorite song. Just when you think you know all the words: surprise, you don’t know anything.” – Grizzled Narrator, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story It’s so incredibly easy to take a musician like… Read More ›
“The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.” When it comes to premiere tales of horror in the modern era, novelist Stephen King is among the first names mentioned. His novels and short stories alike… Read More ›
Featuring not one but two of the great film prologues of the 1970s New Hollywood era, the high-minded horror classic Messiah of Evil (1973) is the latest release from independent Blu-ray distributor Radiance Films. Earlier this year a limited edition… Read More ›