When Drag City announced a couple of years ago that they were releasing a long-lost early ‘70s album by a band you never heard of, named Death, comprising three black brothers from Detroit who made punk rock years before anyone else, the knee-jerk reaction was to assume this was just hipster bait. But your (my) […]
2012
Cinema Fearité presents The Beast of Yucca Flats (Dir. Coleman Francis 1961)
Although no one doubts their physical prowess, it’s no secret that today’s professional wrestlers are as much actors as they are athletes. When a movie needs a certain type of personality, the filmmaker can usually turn to a grappler who wants to make a name for himself in Hollywood, whether as a hero, like Roddy […]
Film Rave: Henning Mankell’s Wallander: The Revenge (Dir. Charlotte Brandstrom 2009)
It has taken over two years for Charlotte Brandstrom’s Wallander: The Revenge to gain theatrical distribution in the U.S., and it has been worth the wait. The Swedish film is a continuation of the highly successful novels written by Henning Mankell that feature the main character Kurt Wallander, a Swedish police detective. Instead of merely […]
A Stupendous Weekend of Fassbinder at The American Cinematheque – More To Come
We’re halfway through the American Cinematheque’s wonderful Fassbinder retrospective, and if it’s demonstrated one thing, it’s that a Fassbinder double bill is a hell of a lot of cinema. His work rate was so prolific that one would assume a film here and there to have been merely tossed off. Some of them were, […]
Film Rant: Hide Away (Dir. Chris Eyre 2011)
Hide Away is the simple story of a man who buys an old ship and fixes it. Even the main characters are simply named the Young Mariner (Josh Lucas), The Ancient Mariner (James Cromwell), and The Waitress (Ayelet Zuerer). The movie is not so much concerned with complicated plot lines as it is with the […]