With INFINITY POOL Brandon Cronenberg continues his father’s great tradition of unsettling images and quasi-familiar realities. He diverges in that, for all the normalization of the disquieting, in that he fails to evince the same undertone impish glee at the macabre so evident in even the elder Mr. Cronenberg’s darkest works. Still, he… Read More »
AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER
And so, after a gap of over 13 years, James Cameron returns us to Pandora with an introduction that posits the most dangerous thing about that locale is that you may come to love her too much. Cameron is quite obviously smitten with his mythical planet whose inhabitants, the 8-foot-tall Na’avi, are more in tune… Read More »
EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (El abrazo de la serpiente) — Ciro Guerra Interview
I didn’t have the best phone connection with Ciro Guerra when we spoke on February 6, 2016, but that didn’t affect the quality of what he had to say about his sublime and savage film, EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT. We started with why he chose black and white rather than color for his film set… Read More »
THE GREEN INFERNO
With an Eli Roth film, one should know what one is getting into, as in, an unspeakably unsettling film that will feature violence, gore, and a side of human nature that does not show the species off to its best advantage.
Joel Schumacher’s PHONE BOOTH
Joel Schumacher knows how to put on a show. Whether it be a full-blown flight of fantasy such as BATMAN AND ROBIN or the more confined space of PHONE BOOTH, in which we spend almost 90 minutes trapped in one with Colin Farrell. Schumacher may not always avoid kitsch, but he’s rarely boring. The same is… Read More »
Eric Schlosser Visits Our FAST FOOD NATION
Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book, “Fast Food Nation” on which the feature film is based pulled no punches when it came to detailing exactly how a cow becomes a hamburger. The film is the same way. Why the actual workings of a slaughter house are included was just one of the many questions I had for this soft-spoken but… Read More »