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Joseph-Marie Lo Duca was an Italian-born journalist, novelist, art critic, and film historian best known as the co-founder in 1951 of the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma with André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Léonide Keigel. Lo Duca was born in Milan, Italy to a family of Sicilian origin. Fascinated from an early age with reading and writing, he published his first novel, La sfera di platino (“The Sphere of Platinum”) in 1927. In 1942, having assembled a wealth of rare documents and objects related to cinema, Lo Duca established the Musée Canudo at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris with the goal of founding the International Museum of Cinema in Rome. The project for the Rome museum, however, did not survive the war. In 1948, he published Le dessin animé (“The Animated Cartoon”) with a preface by Walt Disney. His Histoire du cinéma (1942) was translated into twelve languages while Technique du cinéma (1948) became a noted reference work.Read More »

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Amidst desert landscapes and splendid ocean views, a dog and a parrot appear. They emphasise the cosmic rhythm of day and night.

Amidst desert landscapes and splendid ocean views, a dog and a parrot appear. They emphasise the cosmic rhythm of day and night. Departing from Zabriskie Point, the film surreptitiously crosses over into Mexico, its creative geography never far from our cinematic memory.Read More »

Dadascope is a comprehensive portrait of the Dada movement with its specific techniques of sound and visual clash, word puns, chess, dice and other games of chance. Richter stated, “There is no story, no psychological implication except such as the onlooker puts into the imagery. But it is not accidental either, more a poetry of images built with and upon associations. In other words the film allows itself the freedom to play upon the scale of film possibilities, freedom for which Dada always stood – and still stands.” Read More »

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A remake of West of Zanibar, this strange, gut-wrenching melodrama set in the African jungles, offers a disturbing portrait of a bitter, crippled and insane megalomaniac who vents his rage via mental torture against all those who get too near. Walter Huston plays the madman who lost the use of his legs during a battle with his nemesis Gordon. The accident happened many years ago and since then Huston has dragged himself about in his jungle home making the lives of those around him waking nightmares. He has terrified the local tribesmen into total submission with his knowledge deadly voodoo (he tells them guns are magical instruments). He is even crueler to his fellow Anglos. A young white woman comes to visit one day. Believing her to be the daughter of his arch rival Gordon, he gleefully embarks upon a heavy reign of psychological abuse until the poor girl is nearly destroyed. For more fun, he gets a new doctor addicted to drugs and of course he can also torment the woman who loves him, Velez. The horror continues until Gordon suddenly shows up. Vengeful Huston quickly picks a fight and during the ensuing struggle Gordon tells Huston a bitter truth, one that leads Huston to a horrible realization.Read More »

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Brian De Palma’s trickiest and most ambitious movies often earn the harshest reactions from audiences and critics. Many of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated acts of cinematic gamesmanship are seen by much of the populace, assuming they’re seen at all, as operating on an aesthetic plane that’s roughly equivalent to a fitfully amusing midnight Skinamax entry. Body Double, Femme Fatale’s cynical older cousin, weathered many of the usual accusations of the director’s unoriginality and misogyny.Read More »

comingsoon.net wrote:
SHOCK Revisits David Cronenberg’s Insane Episode Of FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES.

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE SERIES was always an odd duck of a show. The spin-off series (which was also known as FRIDAY’S CURSE in some regions) had no relation to its big screen counterpart aside from the title, and it instead featured the weekly adventures of a group of characters running an antique store called Curious Goods, which was filled with cursed items.

The show had some dud episodes along the way, but it could be a surprisingly creepy affair at times and the premise of collecting haunted items was kind of inspired. It was filmed in Canada throughout its three season run and was shot on a strict ten-day schedule to help keep costs in check. Various guest directors of note passed through its hallways, including Atom Egoyan, Tom McLoughlin (who also directed Jason Lives) and Jennifer Lynch.Read More »

Robert Altman’s electric 1984 filmed version of the play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, starring the inimitable Philip Baker Hall as Tricky Dick, in a one-man show.

From Time Out London:
Alone in his study late at night, Richard Milhouse Nixon ponders the pardon he’s been offered for the Watergate scandal, and contrasts his secret honour with his public shame. Cue for raving resentment galore and perceptive insights into the politics of power and money. Made with a student crew at the University of Michigan, Altman’s one-man theatrical adaptation, for all its dense verbosity, is resolutely cinematic, employing a prowling camera to illuminate the dark areas of its melancholy, megalomaniac hero’s soul. While Baker Hall, ranting with drunken fervour at presidential portraits and a bank of security videos, suggests nothing less than a sometimes lucid, sometimes lunatic incarnation of mediocrity, irredeemably tainted by fame and failure. Fascinating stuff. –Geoff AndrewRead More »

Three strong-willed women (Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Michelle Williams) strive to forge their own paths amidst the wide-open plains of the American Northwest: a lawyer who finds herself contending with both office sexism and a hostage situation; a wife and mother whose determination to build her dream home puts her at odds with the men in her life; and a young law student who forms an ambiguous bond with a lonely ranch hand.Read More »

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If there was one feature that lived up to its title in Berlin this year, it’s Bizarre, French director Etienne Faure’s squiggle of a film about a directionless and taciturn French teenager — with the prerequisite pout, hard abs and studiedly nonchalant way of always being semi-disrobed — who finds refuge in a Bushwick burlesque bar run by two girlfriends who are into (rather explicit) sex with other guys. Often indeed too bizarre for words, this collection of sounds and images in desperate need of a plot, or even just some recognizable human behavior, will appeal to that shady part of the queer market where young cuties plus the promise of nudity are enough for at least some VOD and DVD sales.Read More »