“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 ›
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 ›