Director Peter Jackson has had one of the most unusual journeys in contemporary film history, going from frantic micro-budgeted shock-horror-comedy grossouts shot in his native New Zealand in the mid
The concept behind the box is simplicity itself, exemplified by its title: "25 Films By Akira Kurosawa." This is released in commemoration of what would have been the Japanese master's 100th birthday;
Are You Missing The Spout Blog Like I Am?: You really don't know what you've got till it's gone, do you? Regular readers of this column know that is is often—too often, some believe—a repository for
Nothing happens fast in Herostratus, Don Levy's two-hour-and-twenty-three minute feature film, the only feature he made. Go look at the descriptions of it on the web, check out the plot descriptions
Greetings, people of Earth. I mean, Manny Farber fans. Over at my blog Some Came Running, I've been looking at Farber's picks and positions on his best films of 1951 (the title of his piece for The Nation
I know what you're thinking, you foreign-DVD-mavens and followers of the Eureka!/Masters of Cinema label out there, not that the two groups are in any way mutually exclusive. You're thinking, "Well
Lot of Awards: Okay, now I'm getting confused. Who was it that said "Who gives a f**k about a goddamned Grammy"? Of course it was Public Enemy's Chuck D., but maybe it was also Eminem. In any event
A critic and enthusiast as old as myself was feeling bad for director John Woo a few years back. The American-produced 2002 World War II epic Windtalkers, concerning Native American code-breakers, was
On The Evolution Of CinemaScope: Or, of you're going to be a stickler about names of formats and such, "The 2.35:1 Or So Aspect Ratio." Above: The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953). Above: Bonjour Tristesse
A few weeks back a friend and I were chatting about this whole Polanski business and the reaction to it and such. After reassuring each other with compulsory remarks such as, "Well, he is a fugitive
The Hitman As Existential Hero: A Film Noir Invention?: Why is it that even the most unpretentious, not to say dumb, film noir is so easy to intellectualize? One could blame Sartre, Camus, or
These notes are for Bill Ryan. One would hope that for pretty much every cinephile reading this, the object announced above (from—you'd never guess—Eureka!/Masters of Cinema, Region 2 PAL U.K.) would