Two years after Conan the Barbarian was released on the world, there was a change in guard on the creative side and director Richard Fleischer (Soylent Green) took over the director’s chair, returning with lead actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator;… Read More ›
If you were a kid in the ‘90s, you likely watched MTV and remember some of its original programming like Beavis and Butt-head (1993-1998), Total Request Live (1998-2008), and The Real World (1992-2008). Those are merely three of the *many*… Read More ›
The year is 1982 and the most impressively-formed human being finally gets his big Hollywood break — Arnold Schwarzenegger in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian. While watching the movie today in 2024, it is evident that Conan is certainly a… Read More ›
After its world premiere during Slamdance 2023, the feature-length debut from writer/director Reiki Tsuno (Crying Bitch), Mad Cats, traveled the globe jumping from one film festival to another. At each stop, audiences were invited to enter a world in which… Read More ›
Nostalgia is all the rage these days. Perhaps it was less noticeable when I was younger as the only things being sold to me where the “hip” and “popular” things as I was in the range of folks with disposable… Read More ›
“Based on the American Dream.” These are the words that greet audiences before anything else when pressing “play” on Daniel Brown’s feature-length version of his story Your Lucky Day. The words shouldn’t be ominous, yet things in the country have,… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
No one who is involved in making movies goes out of their way to make anything less than spectacular. This does not mean every movie is going to be gold, nor does it mean every movie is going to be… 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 ›
In a world in which streamers rarely release their films on physical formats and legacy studios are beginning to delete finished films (either for tax purposes or to just remove from servers), there’s something truly wonderful about the relationship developed… Read More ›
It’s been said time and time again, and I believe I’ve even made the exact sentiment in another review prior but it deserves to be said again, if you love physical media then you, we, I, have to do everything… Read More ›
There’s a saying in the Buffyverse that, when paraphrased, states, “To every generation there is a Slayer.” The same can be said for fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Created by comic book artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird,… 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 ›