Reviews & Features

The American Dreamer

The American Dreamer
17 Dec, 1:23 PM

The American Dreamer explicates little of the making of The Last Movie, which, I imagine, it sincerely endeavors to do, but it ventures so freely into self-parody that the commentary it does lend the film is indirectly chastising. It’s unintentional criticism, and yet so remarkably tonally consistent with its companion that it should be considered a peer and not a supplement. If The Last Movie is only an artifact of untempered hubris, then the symptoms of such are clear in this film.

Review by Rumsey Taylor  /  Comment

The Last Movie

The Last Movie
15 Dec, 10:40 AM

Easy Rider made Dennis Hopper an international success—and he responded with a sneering counter-attack. In The Last Movie, Hopper wanted to make film that, unlike its predecessor, could not be consumed and repackaged and capitalized upon. Rather than wistful nodding to the American Dream’s dying embers, the film indicts American influence and idealism as a mindless and corruptive paradox.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comment

The Exiles

The Exiles
18 Nov, 10:24 PM

Kent Mackenzie’s project is principally an ethnographic one, but in spite of the sense of distance between filmmaker and subject this might create, the director nonetheless demonstrates a willingness to listen and to seek their input. The actors lend their lives to the film, working closely with the filmmakers to shape a film that properly reflected many aspects of their daily lives. The result is not simply a document notable for its presumed authenticity, but also one that succinctly conveys the Indians’ extreme ambivalence about their place in American life.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comment

Los Angeles Plays Itself

Los Angeles Plays Itself
18 Nov, 12:40 AM

While it’s useless to imagine Hollywood without Los Angeles, Andersen’s film enables the city to stand on its own, pulling it out of the context of Tinseltown to share a rich, eccentric urban history. The others – New York, Paris, Rome – have their defenders in literature and music (of course, the movies too). In Los Angeles Plays Itself, Andersen celebrates his city just as marvelously, in a sprawling manifesto that still manages to leave us in the hopes of a sequel.

Review by Jenny Jediny  /  Comment

For the Love of Movies

For the Love of Movies
10 Nov, 2:43 PM

Director Gerald Peary emphasizes the essential role that disagreements have played in the history of film criticism: from the quarrels of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael to the frequent arguments of Siskel and Ebert during their influential years as the co-hosts of At the Movies, critics and their audiences have thrived on divergences of opinion. Peary knows that the joys of reading and writing criticism are not so much in passing judgments but in sharing in an ongoing conversation—with the past, the present, and each other. When we talk, think, and write about what moves us, we learn a little bit about each other and ourselves.

Review by Victoria Large  /  Comments (2)

Hausu

Hausu
30 Oct, 3:00 AM

31 Days of Horror – Nobukhi Obayashi’s debut feature incorporates a kitchen sink’s worth of visual and optical effects – matte paintings, chroma key, hand-drawn animation, puppetry, collage, stop-motion, slow-motion, dissolves, irising, and quite a few techniques I’m not sure they have a name for yet – in the service of one of the most bizarre and unpredictable horror movies of all time.

Review by Evan Kindley  /  Comments (4)

The Uninvited

The Uninvited
29 Oct, 3:00 AM

31 Days of Horror – There’s a scene in Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited where young Stella, the bright-eyed young thing at the crux of this ghost story, comments to beau Roderick Fitzgerald on a reckless car ride that being scared is, in fact, quite fun. This is completely analogous to the tone of this much-loved, and unavailable classic (one of the most demanded titles on TCM’s yet-to-be released on DVD list), a movie that gently reveals its spirits, and prefers buttoned-up chills to décolletage and spilled guts.

Review by Jenny Jediny  /  Comment

Zombi 4: After Death

Zombi 4: After Death
28 Oct, 3:00 AM

31 Days of Horror – In pursuit of its pecuniary goal, Zombi 4 borrows heavily from any and all sources of popular zombie fare, including the work of Fulci, Romero, and even Raimi. From a mirroring of Zombie’s isolated island setting, to an abandoned building-siege setpiece that is part Night of the Living Dead farmhouse, part Zombie rural hospital, to the reenactment of Dawn of the Dead’s scene of a solider watching in horror as his dead buddy returns to life, elements of genre classics are brazenly recreated throughout.

Review by Thomas Scalzo  /  Comment

Saw VI

Saw VI
27 Oct, 3:00 AM

31 Days of Horror – Having never seen any of the Saw films, I thought it would be a fun experiment to start with Saw VI, the most recent installation, and see what I could piece together of the previous five films based on my familiarity with other long-running horror franchises. This idea presupposed that the Saw series had the same general lack of serialization of, say, the Friday the 13th series, whose twelve installments were really bound together only by a common killer. The result probably would have consisted mostly of tired jokes about Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover.

Review by Rob Weychert  /  Comments (1)

The Slumber Party Massacre

The Slumber Party Massacre
26 Oct, 3:00 AM

31 Days of Horror – We have been told that slashers are sexist and gross, that the only reason these films exist is to cater to a misogynist culture that derives sick sexual pleasure from watching women die. And even though contemporary film criticism has to some extent drifted toward a more nuanced position on gender in horror, we still have to contend with articles like a recent masterpiece of inanity from the New York Times, which asks the question of why women like horror films with myopic befuddlement—as if women couldn’t possibly watch scary movies for the same reasons men do.

Review by Megan Weireter  /  Comment

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