THE MOVIE:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the standard edition DVD issued by Kino and not the Blu-ray edition under review.

This is my first exposure to the work of Mario Bava, but based on Black Sunday, I need to start seeking out his other films right quick. The Italian horror master's 1960 debut is stylish and spooky, a little bit sexy and a little bit scary, the right combination for a ghouls and witches story.

Black Sunday opens in the late 17th Century, as the Vajda family burns one of their own, alongside her lover, for being a minion of Satan. It's a gruesome death. A metal demon's mask is nailed to their faces before they are burned, so that anyone who looks upon their corpses will know why ...Read the entire review

Twice the fun for the price of one. Kino Classics has released Lisa and the Devil and The House of Exorcism, the one-two punch from famed Italian horror director Mario Bava (and Alfredo Leone), starring Telly Savalas, Elke Sommer, Alida Valli, Eduardo Fajardo, Alessio Orano, Sylva Koscina, and Robert Alda. Originally shot in 1972, Lisa and the Devil's lyrical approach to operatic horror found no takers for international distribution in 1973, so a year later, Bava and producer Leone filmed a completely new subplot involving demonic possession (of course Leone wasn't ripping off The Exorcist...), cut out about twenty minutes of footage, and turned the unsaleable Lisa and the Devil into the box-office smash, The House of Exorcism. Kino has included some tasty extras here for these terrific-looking transfers. Let's look briefly at both movies.

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THE MOVIE:

The question of why an artist is chosen to create and how he or she divines ideas from the ether is one that will never be answered to any real satisfaction. That is the mystery of artistic expression; if we knew how to nail it down, everyone would be artists. Likewise, we aren't really sure why one person might be born with skills that allow him or her to cope in the face of any adversity, and why some find life to be a brittle, fragile, depressing endeavor. Sure, there is the chemistry of the body and other medical explanations, but the ephemeral question remains: why can't I be like you? Why am I automatically sad while you maintain and stay happy?

These are questions that, in some way, drive C. Scott Willis' documentary The Woodmans, whe...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Buddhist Neo-noir. Let that phrase roll around on your tongue. There's something a bit incongruous about it. At least, that's how I felt until I watched Headshot, which uses the phrase in its marketing material. After seeing the film by Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang, I can't think of a better way of describing the blend of philosophy and nail-biting tension contained within.

The film follows Tul (Nopachai Chaiyanam) across fragmented timelines. He used to be a passionate cop until he crossed paths with a drug lord who had political ties. When Tul wouldn't accept a bribe, he was framed for a murder he didn't commit (and that may not have been a murder after all). After being tossed into the gears of the very penal system he had sworn to protect, his idealism slowly faded away. Now, he is employed as an assassin for a shadowy group that is working outside the l...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

This is my first exposure to the work of Mario Bava, but based on Black Sunday, I need to start seeking out his other films right quick. The Italian horror master's 1960 debut is stylish and spooky, a little bit sexy and a little bit scary, the right combination for a ghouls and witches story.

Black Sunday opens in the late 17th Century, as the Vajda family burns one of their own, alongside her lover, for being a minion of Satan. It's a gruesome death. A metal demon's mask is nailed to their faces before they are burned, so that anyone who looks upon their corpses will know why they have died. Unsurprisingly, the devilish lovers drop a devilish curse on the Vajda family for this indignity. No matter how long it takes, Princess Asa Vajd...Read the entire review

The Film:

US distributors of Headshot have hung the film on a gimmick: a cop takes a bullet in the skull and wakes to find his vision is flipped, and he's forced to adjust to this new spin on life while several groups of people try to take him out. It sounds like the recipe for an off-the-wall action film built around wild, disorienting cinematography, but Headshot is almost the opposite, a contemplative character piece with a heavy film noir flavor. Instead of visual flair, the film offers a heavy dose of Buddhist teachings, broken up by brutal violence and some surprisingly compelling, understated romance.

After an opening showing the incident the film was named for, director/writer Pen-ek Ratanaruang jumps back to show the character of Tul (Nopachai Chaiyanam) as an angry police officer who firmly believes his job is to punish evil people. After a bust gone wrong leaves his partner dead, he roughs up...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are taken from stills provided by Kino Lorber, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

"Watching paint dry" is the go-to clich when we're searching for a way to verbally illustrate our boredom with a movie or other experience we find dull, but painting itself makes, oddly enough, a captivating subject for a movie. That's painting, not necessarily painters; as good in their way as Pollock or The Horse's Mouth or Vincent and Theo ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In Mario Bava's 1974 film, Lisa And The Devil, the lovely Elke Sommer plays Lisa, a very pretty young woman who decides to vacation in Spain. After running into a truly strange painting of the devil housed in a building her tour group visits, she winds up getting separated from the vacationers she was traveling with and finds herself lost in an old city. As she wanders around the town, strange things start to happen to her and eventually she meets up with the butler of an old Spanish villa (Telly Savalas) who looks suspiciously like the devil she saw earlier in the painting.

A slow and dreamlike film, Lisa And The Devil proves to be a genuinely unsettling film that builds to a truly eerie conclusion. Rich with metaphors and strange imagery, the film toys around with the connections that may or may not exist between the spiritual world and the physical plai...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Films that tend to include a bit of explicit sexual material while attempting to not be entirely sensationalist are a hit and miss proposition among audiences because they largely include too much of one and not enough of the other. An interesting entry into the foray is Elles, a French film starring an attractive Oscar winning actress.

Said actress is Juliette Binoche (The English Patient), who plays Anne, a wife, mother and journalist for the French version of Elle magazine. Her most recent article focuses generally on French prostitution, but specifically on two young women. Charlotte (Anais Demoustier) is a young middle class girl who lives with her parents and has a boyfriend, though no one appears to know what she is doing. The other girl is Alicja (Joanna Kulig), an immigrant f...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

The quietude of certain films, their calm contemplation of troubling events, can be extremely disturbing and devastating, even more traumatizing than eye-averting graphic violence. Such is the case with Pablo Larrain's (Tony Manero) 2010 picture Post Mortem, a political allegory set in Santiago, Chile during the horrendous, mass-murdering 1973 military coup that overthrew that country's elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and installed in his place a brutal dictator, the notorious (and, quietly, U.S./CIA-abetted) general Augustin Pinochet. Coolly, stoically eliding the actual Pinochet bloodbath to show us the "normal" lives that went on around it, the p...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Playful. Sweet. Silly. Delightful. These were words I jotted down as I watched The Fairy. I couldn't be bothered with constructing complete sentences because I was too busy smiling from ear to ear for the duration of the film. Filmmakers Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy use a firm foundation of physical and visual comedy to give us a touching tale that speaks to a bygone era while feeling timeless itself.

Dom (Dominique Abel) is going though another day of drudgery, working the night shift at a small French hotel when a woman approaches him with a most intriguing offer. Her name is Fiona (Fiona Gordon) and she claims to be a fairy. As part of her job description she offers him three wishes. He, in utter confusion, offers her a room. And so begins their unusual courtship. One skinny-dipping-and-underwater-dance-sequence (!!!) later, Dom is absolute...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The images used here are promotional stills provided by MK2 and are not taken from the Blu-ray edition under review.

The Fairy (La F e) is the third film by a trio of French filmmakers -- Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy -- who are old-fashioned in the best possible sense. The Fairy could accurately be described as a romantic comedy, but as in the films where Chaplin (City Lights), Keaton (Seven Chances), or Jacques Tati (Read the entire review

If the great Jacques Tati were alive and still making movies, I suspect he'd be directing something awfully close to The Fairy (La f e, 2011), a very funny and clever French-Belgian comedy clearly directly inspired by Tati and other gods of film comedy, but which is also a completely distinctive work with plenty of original sight gags, funny situations, and appealing, contemporary characters. As a great admirer of Tati (I consider Play Time one of the greatest films ever made) this is no small compliment.

Another compliment is that while the film has some French dialogue, it's overwhelmingly visual and so much in the tradition of silent and early talkie comedy that one could easily turn off the English subtitles and still have no trouble following the story. It's a real gem, and one of the best films I've seen this year.

This Kino Lorber release offers a flawless 1920 x 1080p...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Derek Jarman was both punk rock auteur and sensitive artist, and his obsession with life's shabby beauty is given an excellent vehicle in his 1987 film, The Last of England.

The Last of England is ostensibly a post-apocalyptic motion picture, a divergent future made possible by Margaret Thatcher's conservative politics and all the misery they entailed. The film is not really science fiction, nor is it in any way conventional in terms of narrative. It's more collage than story, more like a performance piece than genre cinema. Cut to the music of Barry Adamson, Diamanda Galas, Marianne Faithfull, and others, Jarman's film has a lot in common with 1980s music videos--a few of which he was even responsible for. (He directed clips for the ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

A band of ski-masked figures holding machine guns puts handsome young men up against a wall for execution; elsewhere, in some sort of hellish, bonfire-lit twilight, some of the same gunmen stand guard over a group of the huddled masses on a grimy pier somewhere along the Thames against a backdrop of an apocalyptically bombed-out-looking London in the distance. A happy, free young woman (Tilda Swinton, whose memorable but very brief appearance it's probably somewhat misleading to call "starring," as this Blu-ray's front cover copy understandably does) remembers flowers and springtime as she prepares for her wedding, then slashes more and more desperately with a knife and even tears with her teeth at a binding gown she can't seem to get out of. A mod...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

I had never heard of the photographer Francesca Woodman before watching The Woodmans, director C. Scott Willis's recent film about Woodman's life and that of her artistic family, whose own lives were permanently altered by her suicide at the age of 22. The fact is, the film may not even have existed without the Woodmans' story being marked by that sad, scarring event, and indeed, Francesca's work and her posthumous fame is one of the things about which the film is most incisive, evenhanded, informative, and involving. But that's not nearly the extent of its accomplishment. Willis so clearly and powerfully evokes the complexity of the multiple, enmeshed stories within this unusual (but also, in its dynamics and roles, very recognizable) famil...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Seventies French film Les Valseuses a/k/a Going Places is an often disturbing erotic farce. The French title is apparently a vulgar euphemism for testicles, which gives you some idea of the level of discourse that director Bertrand Blier is aiming for, though he pulls off the film with skill and wit.

Jean-Claude (Gerard Depardieu in his first major film role and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere) are a couple of down at the heels grifters, who roam across France looking for sex and fine food. They have no problem with copping a feel, slapping a woman around, or forcing themselves on her sexually. Neither do they see much of an issue with stealing money or cars, which they do eight or nine times during the film. In fact, it is through stealing a car that they meet the girl who becomes something of an anchor or a muse for them. She's Marie-Ange (Miou-Miou), and they grab her...Read the entire review

The Film:

Ah, the dreamy 90s, when independent film finally bled into the mainstream and a former porn-theater-usher-slash-video-store-clerk exploded on the scene with a brutal verbose crime film. How we got there has been detailed in all its intricacy by career journalist Peter Biskind in his two must-read books Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures. Would Biskind agree with this writer in condemning Sam Henry Kass' The Search for One-Eye Jimmy as an irritable slice-of-Brooklyn-life ham sandwich that landed an outstanding ensemble cast and proceeded to waste their considerable talents? This is a film that skates bare on charm alone, and frequently even that is not enough.

In resurrecting Kass' debut feature, Kino Lorber smartly chose to highlight the cast, despite the fact that several members appear for, at most, five minutes, if not less. The morsel of...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
A look at what makes a real man's man

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Good documentaries
Likes: Kevin Smith, the bear concept
Dislikes: "Travelogue" documentaries
Hates: Homophobia

The Movie
If I was gay, there's no doubt I would be considered a "bear," Though my predilection for flannel died in the late '90s, I've long maintained the facial hair and bulk that would mark me as part of the LGBT sub-culture dedicated to large, hairy manly men (though admittedly whether I'm a "manly man" is certainly up for debate.) Though it's come to be positioned as something of a fetish, where guys have a taste for a cuddly teddy-bear of a man, the bear scene is far more than an physical thing, as it's wr...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Littlerock is the story of Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), siblings from Japan, on their way to San Francisco. Shit happens and they are detoured into one of California's more sleepy towns. The town is Littlerock, which is in the Antelope Valley next to Lancaster. Essentially, they're way off course.

Rintaro and Atsuko have time to kill and join up with some of the local young people to party it up. They spend their time drinking, smoking, and whatnot. Atsuko spends her time turning down the various advances from all the guys in the town. Even language barriers transcend turning down creepers.

Rintaro and Atsuko befriend Cory (or the other way around)(Cory Zacharia), who is one of the local kids that lives in Littlerock. Cory has problems of his own like avoiding certain drug dealing parties that he owes money to. The funny part is that after...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's difficult to describe a film such as Modus Operandi. It is an independently produced, micro-budgeted m lange of such disparate genres as Blaxploitation, giallo, spy thriller and noir, filmed (almost) entirely in Milwaukee, WI. Writer, director, editor Frankie Latina is either a certified film genius, or suffering under a deep obsession. Either way, we get to enjoy the cinematic confection he's whipped up.

The story (such as it is, and at its best it is tenuous and confusing) concerns ex-CIA super agent Stanley Cashay (Randy Russell). After Cashay's wife is murdered, he retires from the CIA to drown his sorrows in booze. When two briefcases containing sensitive material are stolen from presidential candidate Squire Parks (Michael Sottile), Cashay is pulled out of retirement to retrieve them. Cashay recruits two old friends to help, playboy Casey Thunderbird (Barry...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The screen captures used here are taken from promotional materials provided by Kino Lorber, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

Celebrity profiles might seem to be one of the more disposable categories of entertainment, but like anything else, it's all in the details and execution. Since we seem to live in a time where far too many people become "celebrities" just by being profiled, some caution is definitely in order, but there are still those who got famous for doing something creative or otherwise worthwhile. Not too long ago, we got a sharp cinematic reminder of that with the surprisingly intimate Woody Allen: ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Okay, first off, I should disclose that I went into This is Not a Movie a little bit grumpy. When I put my name down for it, I wasn't paying close enough attention. I thought I was getting Jafar Panahi's This is Not a Film, which is an entirely different thing. This is Not a Film is an acclaimed Iranian cinematic experiment; This is Not a Movie is an altogether terrible psychedelic cultural satire by Mexican director Olallo Rubio. It stars Edward Furlong as three different versions of the same character, representing different aspects of his personality. By my count, that's three Edward Furlongs too many.

Actually, that's not fair. If there is one com...Read the entire review

The Movie:

To understand and appreciate the 'No Wave' film movement that came out of New York City in the seventies and the subsequent 'Cinema Of Transgression' movement that followed, you have to understand where those involved were coming from at the time this all started to reach a boil. French filmmaker Celine Danhier's 2010 film Blank City does a pretty good job of doing just that by tracking down more of the people involved than most familiar with all of this would have probably thought possible, getting them to sit down in front of the camera and open up about the odd little movies they made and about the scene that surrounded it.

In the mid-seventies, New York City was suffering some serious financial woes and the Lower East Side of Manhattan was a bit of a wasteland. Abandoned buildings were common, landlords were regularly torching various properties to cash in on th...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Please Note: The stills used here are taken from the film's promotional materials, not the Blu-ray edition under review.

One mark of an excellent documentary is its ability to draw the viewer into a topic, a debate, or--as in the case of C line Danhier's Blank City--a "scene" in which he or she may not have had any very deep or sustainable interest at the outset. Danhier, a French cinephile valuing and studying an exclusively American cinematic phenomenon in a way no American probably ever would, takes us back to what was by all appearances and most accounts a dead period for cinema-as-art, that moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the movie studios had lost most of their Altman/Scorsese/Coppola adventur...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The gritty melodrama Story of a Love Affair sports an intriguing story of lovers under scrutiny, set in the prosperous but strangely still and bleak streets of 1950 Milan. As the first non-documentary effort from noted Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, L'Avventura), the film doesn't seem to share much in common with his better-known '60s work. Not on the surface, anyhow - it actually plays more like a modest noir with an Italian Neorealist setting.

Story of a Love Affair opens in a Milan detective office, with a man named Carloni (played by Gino Rossi) shuffling through some snapshots of a pretty young woman. The photos were brought to the attention of the detective agency by the husband of the woman in the photos, a wealthy local businessman by the name of Fontana. Although the couple has been married for seven years, the discovery of ...Read the entire review

THE FILM:

Reel Injun is a film with a knotty, fascinating, and important story to tell about the intersection of Native American history with the medium--the cinema--that was born just as that history seemed to be coming to a tragic, ignobly inflicted end. Director Neil Diamond (no, not that Neil Diamond) is himself a Native American of the Cree tribe (which inhabits a far northern region of Canada, near the Arctic Circle), and he attempts to give Reel Injun a framing device through his own personal, investigative road trip across North America to visit actual sites of significance to Native Americans while reflecting on the troubled, often treacherous relationship of Native culture to the way it has been depicted in the movies. Along th...Read the entire review