|Yuval Klein| The Italian neorealism era of 1940s cinema conveyed social frustration and stories of the working class through realism and minimal-ism. In the decades after, the face of Italian cinema would gain many dimensions and features that grew upon yet deviated from the standard. Continue reading
|Alec Gruba| Look, I don’t know what’s going to play at Grindhouse Trailer Spectacular!, but I do know what I’m ready for: Context-free explosions and slow-motion car crashes, ghouls, BloodSatanic biker gangs, practical effects, black leather gloves reaching out towards… Continue reading
|Matt Clark| “A title reflects a man’s honor. You have none.” 7 Grand-masters (1977), from Taiwanese director Joseph Kuo, was advertised in US markets with the tagline “IT NEVER STOPS!” There could not be a more accurate description of the film. It’s the period tale of a martial arts… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| “Live. Die. Repeat.” This is one of the great movie taglines, and you have to take what pleasures you can get in the fallen world of alien-invasion blockbusters like Edge of Tomorrow (2014). It is so great a tagline, in fact, that some posters for the film featured it… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| Is WALL-E (2008), the dystopian frolic of a film celebrated for its cleverly desolated planet Earth, its jokes aimed at adults, and its lonely robot protagonist, really a movie for kids? Of course it is. There’s the all-ages slapstick for one thing. Our titular hero, WALL-E, has a job… Continue reading
|Jeremy Warden| “I believe the human brain is attracted to whatever errors it can perceive in art,
and that’s part of what makes stop motion so appealing to people.” -Don Hertzfeldt Maybe this isn’t exactly what he said, but reading that line in the director’s notes… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| The car accident is one of the most abused tropes in cinema. It has more action film credits than The Rock, more Marvel cameos than Stan Lee. It’s a bullish punchline in an infuriating amount of comedies. When done poorly – and I believe it’s almost always done poorly… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| A lot of digital ink has been spilled over the origins of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Writer-director Steven Spielberg never tried to pawn it off as a straight-up Stanley Kubrick enterprise (it’s one of only three films in Spielberg’s career on which he takes both credits… Continue reading
|Timothy Zila| Those were the years after the ice caps had melted because of the greenhouse gases, and the oceans had risen to drown so many cities along all the shorelines of the world. Millions of people were displaced. Climates became chaotic. Governments introduced… Continue reading
|Matt Levine| The turn of the millennium occasioned many films that lamented and/or celebrated the digitization of the world as we knew it. The Matrix and its sequels envisioned all of humanity living in a virtual reality while machines sucked out our lifeblood… Continue reading
