As with any Herzog effort, there are pleasures to be found in Fireball, but the end result still offers decisively diminishing returns for the prolific director. There was a time when the release of a new Werner Herzog film, whether a new oddball fiction effort…
The works of Lloyd Kaufman, founder and director of Troma Films, have always been about breaking the boundaries of what can be shown and told in a genre film, an ideology that has helped gain him a cult following. The stylings of a Troma film…
Manga and anime artist Osamu Tezuka has been almost universally praised for his works in numerous genres (romance, sci-fi, even erotica); his son, Macoto Tezuka, is a visual artist and filmmaker in his own right, but a more obscure one. Only recently, through the…
Peninsula is admittedly better than most recent zombie fare, but is reflective of an overall cinematic failure to innovate the genre. The zombie film is, at this point, a cinematic staple. Given the sheer number of zombie narratives over the past decade, any qualitative assessment…
Expectations for Crazy Samurai Musashi are pretty clear. Everything surrounding the film — the popular history that informs the film’s plot, the trailers and publicity materials — is trying to sell you on its gimmick: a one-take, film-length samurai action sequence. But first, some…
Atom Egoyan’s latest is a self-serious dud that finds the director trying and failing to recall his once impressive weighty themes. There’s a certain level of absurdness that is only manifested in an auteur’s twilight years, reaching for that kind of ephemerality that once…
The Trip to Greece continues the series’ trend of increasingly mature developments and proves a satisfying end. The Trip to Greece, purportedly the closing installment of the TV series/film hybrid directed by Michael Winterbottom, is permeated by that sensation of finality. Rob Brydon and…
Bacurau‘s initial promise of a raucous genre celebration ultimately devolves into a shallow approximation of those pleasures. There’s an undeniable sensuousness to the surfaces of Bacurau: from the music choices (including a John Carpenter composition, speaking volumes to the film’s influences), to the mixture of…
Patricio Guzmán’s latest documentary offers similar but waning insight to his two previous, more successful efforts. The Cordillera of Dreams is the third and final film in the unofficial trilogy directed by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán, preceded by the critically acclaimed Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button.…
Young Ahmed is an misguided effort in the Dardennes’ usually rock solid filmography. Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne have created a corpus of films strong enough to build the case that they are among the most important European directors working of the past two decades; their…
