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Be Quick or Be Dead: The Rebirth of the ‘Spaghetti Western’ in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
The release of a Quentin Tarantino movie is always an event, and it has been ever since the director took Hollywood by storm with his debut Reservoir Dogs and his sophomore effort Pulp Fiction about two decades ago. It’s not too hard to see why. People simply dig the coolness and the mystique surrounding his […]
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Sail Away Sweet Sister: Early Alfred Hitchcock Rediscovered in Graham Cutts’s The White Shadow
Now that we’ve survived the apocalypse and the end of 2012, let’s kick off the new year with a piece of early cinema long considered lost forever. Most of us know Alfred Hitchcock as a director of thrillers and, occasionally, bizarre comedies, who frequently adapted novels, short stories, and plays for the screen. Yet few […]
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Brothers in Arms: A Different ‘Holiday Season’ in Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
Christmas – it’s the holiday season of giving that allows you to look back at the year behind you, reflect it, enjoy the little things in life, and all the people around you. Sometimes we take for granted just how lucky we are, despite the world of today being a scary place now and then. […]
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Countdown to Extinction: What if Tomorrow Never Comes in Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World
So December 21st, 2012, has finally arrived, and we’re still alive and well – despite a myriad of (drug-inflicted) doomsday scenarios and predictions. Disaster movies have sprung up like mushrooms in recent years, tackling the question what you would do if you knew your time was short. Think Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster 2012 and countless others. […]
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Eyes of a Stranger: Voyeurism and Horror in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom
Norman Bates from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is universally regarded as the quintessential movie psychopath. Nowadays, he’s simply an indispensable member of the greatest onscreen characters of all time. Psycho’s importance becomes obvious when we consider that its filming is about to become the topic of a feature called Hitchcock by Sacha Gervasi with Anthony Hopkins, […]
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When Dream and Day Unite: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries as a Rather Peculiar Road Trip
With nine Academy Award nominations, the Swedish son of a priest Ingmar Bergman is both among most successful European filmmakers and among the most renowned directors never to take home one of the prestigious golden trophies. Three of his movies won Oscars as Best Foreign Films, The Virgin Spring, Through A Glass Darkly, and the […]
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Falling into Infinity: The Bottom Line on the Indie Epic Cloud Atlas by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis
A big-budget independent movie based on a novel considered to be ‘unfilmable’ – that sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? Three renowned directors still made the daring choice to tackle David Mitchell’s 2004 book Cloud Atlas. They hired an international all-star cast consisting of the likes of Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, […]
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Alone in Bad Company: A Dissection of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese has seen it all. After a two-score year long journey in which he had experienced the highs and the lows of the business, the director has frequently been hailed ‘America’s greatest living filmmaker’ in recent years and was finally even awarded the elusive Academy Award for Best Achievement in Directing for The Departed […]
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The Hidden Face
The Hidden Face (La Cara Oculta), is a surprising gem of a film. The film is set in the sprawling city of Bogota, Columbia. A well-respected conductor from Spain by the name of Adrian (Quim Gutiérrez) falls in love with a girl named Belen (Clara Lago). The relationship is going great until one day she […]
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The Higher They Rise, The Steeper They Fall: The Rise and Fall, and Rise of the American Gangster Movie
Seemingly always en vogue, gangsters have been especially so in recent years. The grand seigneur of American cinema, Martin Scorsese, finally won his long-deserved first Academy Award for Best Achievement in Directing for The Departed in 2007. Michael Mann’s 2009 effort Public Enemies was a big-budget production with high-dollar stars. The HBO drama The Sopranos […]
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Ip Man
Ip Man Carl Douglas’s famous song “Everybody loves Kung Fu fighting” rings in the ears of everyone about the majesty and absolute cool factor of every kung fu movie. In my opinion though, if you haven’t watched Ip Man (pronounced “eep- mun”), you ain’t seen nothing yet. For all you kung fu geeks, Ip Man […]