The new Blu-ray Disc (BD) version of Up — released on the same day as the BD of director Pete Docter's debut effort, Monsters, Inc. — is a revelation in at least one regard: it demonstrates that 2D is better. … [read more]

For tonight's screening of Precious at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY — the neighborhood arthouse serving Deep Focus World Headquarters in Sleepy Hollow — a woman had driven down from somewhere upstate. She spoke up during... … [read more]

Catherine Deneuve is Carole, a London flat-dweller who starts to go out of her mind from fear and paranoia after her roommate sister and her beau go on holiday, leaving her by herself in the apartment. … [read more]

Fulci's killer stalks New York women and mutilates them with an unmistakably sexual aggression, although he's apparently not a rapist. He's a stock genre character except for one thing: he talks like Donald Duck, complete with frenzied quacking noises. … [read more]

In an era when the state-of-the-art in popular horror films is split between the practiced cruelty and borderline hostility of neo-gore exercises like the Saw and Hostel franchises and the incidental soullessness of Friday the 13th and Last House on the Left remakes, this film, in its straightforward, low-concept fright-mongering, feels downright fresh. … [read more]

Director Anthony Balch, known both as a collaborator on film projects with William S. Burroughs and as a shrewd cinema programmer and distributor, made this cheesy but imaginative and good-natured horror show on a shoestring. Swinging singles Jason (Robin Askwith) and Judy (Phoebe Shaw, credited as Vanessa Shaw) take a holiday at an old, vaguely threatening English manor. By the time they figure out that the other houseguests have been lobotomized, it's too late. … [read more]

Lars Von Trier has been ducking accusations that he holds the female sex in a rather low regard for as long as he's been making movies about suffering women. … [read more]

It's not simply that the on-stage enthusiasm is infectious, but that something special is coming up: the room is about to be blitzed by one of the world's greatest live bands in polyrhythmic rock-and-roll mode. … [read more]

They say all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. But if you've got a girl and a killer robot, then you're really onto something. One of the joys of low-budget horror movies is that the stakes are low enough that filmmakers can get away with a lot of crazy shit, and there's crazy shit aplenty in Hardware, the post-apocalyptic SF/horror feature debut of South African director Richard Stanley. The film takes its visual and thematic cues from Alien and Blade Runner, with a few ideas from The Terminator and Demon Seed thrown into the mix. But when you boil it down, Hardware is just a gritty, crudely fashioned cyberpunk monster movie. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, boy do you need to see this. … [read more]

Lorna is in Belgium on false pretenses. She married a man, a junkie, in order to gain citizenship. The men who arranged her relocation to Belgium from Albania have a plan for her. Once she is widowed -- and the men will see to it that she becomes a widow -- she is to marry a Russian, who will use her legal status as a Belgian to gain his own citizenship. … [read more]

My review of Obsessed is online at FilmFreakCentral.net: When Hollywood types assimilate exploitation tropes and tactics, they start concocting films like Obsessed, in which Skinny White Bitch Ali Larter runs seriously afoul of Virtuous Black Woman Beyoncé Knowles by... … [read more]

The latest addition to Criterion's budget-priced and barebones Eclipse line-up is this boxed set of five films from a cycle of tough-minded crime dramas that enjoyed popularity in post-WWII Japan. Little-seen in the U.S., this group of films as a whole probably benefits from Japanese settings and attitudes that bring a sense of freshness, even exoticism, to straightforward genre exercises. But the films are entertaining and engrossing on their own terms, and, more than that, they paint an interesting picture of a culture in a generational transition and, perhaps, a bit of an identity crisis … [read more]