A war photographer, a stewardess, and a chance meeting set the stage for an 87-minute technicolor adventure of crime, mystery, and romance in director Yasuharu Hasebe’s (Retaliation) 1966 caper Black Tight Killers (俺にさわると危ないぜ). The first of several collaborations with lead… Read More ›
If you’ve never heard of the Italian Napoleonic drama Allonsanfàn before today, don’t worry, almost no one has. I had not heard of it until Radiance Films announced this Blu-ray release, and one of Vulture’s film critics Bilge Ebiri quote… Read More ›
In the world of animation, there are well-known names like Walt Disney (Steamboat Willie) and Matt Groening (The Simpsons; Futurama), niche names like Rebecca Sugar (Steven Universe), and then there are names so large that they crafted entire houses around… Read More ›
You gotta love ‘70s Kung-Fu cinema. Within the first 15 minutes of Huang Feng’s The Shaolin Plot, a man is killed with a chicken leg, an assassination attempt is flawlessly averted, and a disobedient guest’s head is cut off by… Read More ›
During the debut year for physical media boutique Radiance Films, a distributor interested in lesser-available/known international cinema, they released a wonderful three-film collection of director Damiano Damiani’s film dubbed “Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero in three Mafia Tales by Damiano Damiani.”… Read More ›
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom. – Arthur Schopenhauer 56 years ago, the writer of Bullitt, Alan Trustman, and the director of In the Heat of the Night, Norman Jewison, released their sexy crime thriller The… Read More ›
It’s 1985 and author Toshio Shimao releases “The Sting of Death” and Other Stories, a collection of works, the primary one being described as autobiographical. Five years later, writer/director Kōhei Oguri (Muddy River) would adapt that central tale into his… Read More ›
“Sugar. Butter. Flour.” These are the first words we hear in Waitress, The Musical, the Diane Paulus-directed (Cirque du Soleil: Amaluna) stage production that adapts the 2007 Adrienne Shelly-written/directed/starred romantic comedy non-musical Waitress. These three words signify the start of… Read More ›
In 2020, DC Entertainment kicked off what’s become known as the TomorrowVerse via Superman: The Man of Tomorrow, introducing a new animated universe centered on the introduction of the biggest hero of DC Comics, Superman. After, six more films would… 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 ›
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 ›