It’s hard to watch The Heroic Trio (1993) and not feel like you’re seeing one of the most entertaining movies ever made. Its collection of gonzo delights (some of which are best left unspoiled) and imaginative sense of worldbuilding make it a treat for fans of cinema that is a little off the beaten path…. Read more »
Why do some films seem to get endlessly parodied, referenced, and remade decades after their release? Like the sequence of the baby carriage rolling down the steps in 1925’s Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) or the eponymous “red balloon” of The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956), we see iconography from certain films repeatedly ported into others…. Read more »
Vampires are a B-movie staple. Whether produced by Hammer Films or Roger Corman, off-Hollywood audiences never seem to tire of them. They’re a monster that’s just human enough to be alluring but still dangerous and thrilling. While the film vampire has had strong erotic undertones since at least Bela Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal of Count Dracula,… Read more »
“So, Von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even though they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally — he lived in a visual world. The explanation plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. His expression was… Read more »
A heart beats on the soundtrack. We see a head covered in a stocking, but the face is not visible. The stocking tears, revealing layers upon layers of tearing material, newspaper, collaged mouths cut from magazines ripping away to reveal only more mouths. After the credits, we return to a shot of a woman with… Read more »
Though the singular French filmmaker Robert Bresson was once thought of as a kind of transcendentalist, and was even discussed as such alongside Carl Dreyer and Yasujirō Ozu in Paul Schrader’s famous book Transcendental Style in Film (1972), more recent criticism on Bresson has pushed back against this as the dominant hermeneutic approach. If transcendentalist… Read more »