Forced to walk a difficult release path since its ill-fated Sundance debut in 2007, "Hounddog" has been reworked and purged of its sins, hoping to drop the unofficial title "The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie" and move on to more promising assessments of quality beyond the superficial. While accusations of sensationalism are unfounded, "Hounddog" remains a crude, tedious affair, providing some insight as to why the film was ignored nearly two years ago and why it should remain so today.

A young North Carolina free spirit, Lewellen (Dakota Fanning) spends her day romping around the backwoods, avoiding the stern punishments of Grammie (Piper Laurie) and her father (David Morse), while dreaming of Elvis and his musical liberation. A pre-teen on the verge of womanhood, Lewellen is unaware of her burgeoning sexuality, attracting the attention of lecherous boys while trying to sort out her own domestic troubles...Read the entire review

The movie

As far as fashion goes, I'm ajeans-and-t-shirt kind of person. Fortunately, the demands of fashionon college teachers are fairly light: throw a blazer over anyreasonably decent shirt and you'll look suitably professorial. Sowhen it comes to haute couture, all my knowledge comes from watchingThe House of Eliott - fun but not really the basis for anunderstanding of modern fashion, I suspect. I'd heard of Yves SaintLaurent before the DVD titled with his name showed up in my mailbox,but honestly that's about it. (All you folks who are in the knowabout fashion probably just shuddered at my ignorance. I apologize inadvance.)

Yves Saint Laurent: Collector'sEdition is actually a pairing of two documentaries: "HisLife and Times" (77 minutes) and "5th Avenue Marceau"(85 minutes) (There's a "play all" feature a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Perhaps a past is at its most haunting when you can only catch glimmers of it. Memories are weighty things; does a memory hold even more formidable power when it is a phantom?

La Vie Promise, a 2002 French film, chronicles the journey of a troubled woman who returns to a past she has all but erased from memory. Fortunately, director-writer Olivier Dahan avoids the melodramatic reveal; there are no a-ha! epiphanies that explain why coldhearted Sylvia (Isabelle Huppert) ditched a loving husband and a baby for life as a prostitute in Nice. There are tantalizing clues here and there, but ultimately we get no fuller picture than the vague hints accorded to our difficult, enigmatic protagonist.

Sylvia's life is thrown into upheaval when her 14-year-old daughter, Laurence (Maud Forget), shows up, having run away from foster care. Sylvia is dismissive, even belli...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

When we think of samurai films, we tend to think of action epics with lots of fighting and fountains of blood, usually with a theme of good vs. evil, honor vs. dishonor. What tends to get overlooked, however, is that being a samurai is a class distinction, and like any other social structure, there are different levels. Just as there are nobleman samurai, there are also petty samurai who are required to do things like catalogue the food supply.

Yôji Yamada's 2002 film, The Twilight Samurai, concerns itself with just such a figure. Seibei Iguchi (Hiroyuki Sanada, The Promise) is a widower who struggles to get by, supporting his two daughters and his senile mother. His wife was from a higher class than he was, and her prolonged illness and t...Read the entire review

The Film:
Let me say for the record that I am a huge fan of Fred Williamson. I love him in films like Black Caesar, Vigilante, Three the Hard Way, Black Eye. But there's another type of Fred Williamson movie out there, and some of you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about those films that he's directed. And while there will always be a place in my heart for even the worst films Fred has been in – specifically, films like Hell Up in Harlem – those that he's directed are a special kind of crap.

Back in the 1970s Williamson started his production company, Po Boy Productions, and began churning out some exceptionally bad B-movie garbage, including Death Journey, No Way Back, and Mean Johnny Barrows. The 1980s saw Po Boy still spewing out one terrible film after another, including this schlock from 1983.

The Big ScoreRead the entire review

The Series:

One of the coolest things about growing up as a kid in Ontario, Canada during the late seventies and early eighties was being able to catch episodes of a now little known television show called The Hilarious House Of Frightenstein. Not widely known outside of its home and native land (though it was syndicated and broadcast in chopped up, shorter versions through a scant few American stations), the show was produced by CHCH in Hamilton and starred not only a Canadian actor by the name of Billy Van (who showed up on Bizarre from time to time – the show that made Super Dave Osborne a star), but also featured segments with the one and only Vincent Price.

It should be mentioned that when The Hilarious House Of Frightenstein was originally broadcast on Canadian television that the episodes were an hour long including commercials. The four episodes on this...Read the entire review

The Film:

Monsieur N. is a rather unique project directed by the popular host of the European TV show "Eurotrash" Antoine de Caunes who also appeared behind the camera of the chic vampire extravaganza Les Morsures de l'aube a.k.a Love Bites co-starring Asia Argento and Guillaume Canet. While "Eurotrash" mostly relies on cheap sensationalism and strives to please audiences often bored by mundane TV programming Antoine de Caunes' latest feature film Monsieur N. seems to be targeting a whole new communi...Read the entire review

The Movie

Imagine hyperactive auteur Quentin Tarantino helming a David Mamet-penned episode of a Brazilian telenovela in the early Seventies and you've got a pretty good approximation of the flavor of Aluizio Abranches' The 3 Marias. Equal parts soap opera, tragedy and Western, this revenge flick echoes the mother of all wronged women tales, "Medea," with an appropriately heavy dollop of gore thrown in.

Abranches' film, fueled by Heitor Dhalia and Wilso Freire's thin screenplay, opens with a bang as a man and his two sons are gruesomely dispatched in what is soon revealed to be a crime motivated by unfulfilled passions - a Brazilian woman named Filomena (Marieta Severo) jilted Firmino Santos Guerra (Carlos Vereza), who responded by ruthlessly murdering the man she chose and her offspring from that union.

Guerra neglects to remember Filomena's three daughters - ...Read the entire review