Based on a series of books by the same name, “The Spiderwick Chronicles” is a vibrant film adaptation that shows the world around us, filled with magical creatures. We’re all used to the story of a mother, a daughter and twin boys move into a decrepit old house outside a small country town in New […]
In the Valley of Elah” is director/screenwriter Paul Haggis’ adaptation of a Playboy article written by Mark Boal, about the death of Richard Davis, who was killed after returning home from Iraq. The movie finds a release at a profitable time, when its blatant anti war message rings upon sympathetic ears across America. Several years
Based on the 2002 Hong Kong horror movie, “The Eye” stars Jessica Alba as the recipient of a cornea transplant that restores her sight, but with the added superpower of being able to see the dead spirits that walk the streets with us. The original movie was relatively popular in Hong Kong, though it only
The Thing” is john Carpenter’s 1982 of the original 1951 film “The Thing From Another World”. It recreates the premise of a group of scientists, stuck in the Antarctic, that find a hostile shapeshifting alien that has laid dormant for thousands of years in the Antarctic ice. As a shapeshifter, once it gets going, it
Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” is one of his most renowned and best loved films, with his mastery of audio and visual language on full effect for this barely coherent horror movie centered on a coven of witches. Years after its 1977 release, the film has lost much of its weight; the gore and special effects are
This 1947 film noir is staged around the traveling carnival, using the temptations of wealth and trickery to bring the heavy hands of fate on the main character, Stan, played by Tyrone Power. Stan starts off as a young apprentice to a mind reader named Zeena, who is rumoured, used to be in the ‘big-time’,
Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-Sheng was the centerpoint of the films of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang; working with the celebrated director must have taught Lee something about filmmaking, as he’s reinvented himself as a director of his own accord. “Help Me Eros” is his second feature, and it screened at the Sydney Film Festival, on a
Julie Delpy wrote, directed and starred in “2 Days in Paris”, a whirlwind of disorientating shots from a short stopover in Paris, visiting her family and friends with her American boyfriend. Well, that’s the story Delpy plays Marion, a photographer, and Adam Goldberg is Jack, her American boyfriend with a Woody like New York personality.
There’s an iconic photo taken on the shooting of “Apocalypse Now” of director Francis Ford Coppola holding a pistol to his head, his eyes locked with the camera in a bestial, glazed look. That pose may well have been a joke, but it’s served to encapsulate the passion and terror behind “Apocalypse Now” a director
At some point between making “Audition”, “Ichi the Killer” and “Dead or Alive”, notorious Japanese director Takashi Miike managed to direct the outlandish film “The City of Lost Souls”, a crime and gangster film that depicts the rotten underground of Tokyo. Of course, this is all tedious stuff for Miike, who has been firmly entranced
