Vampyr: Criterion Collection
July 30, 2008
Made in 1930 during the early days of sound, Vampyr (1932) was based on In A Glass Darkly, a collection of supernatural stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and filmed in three languages (English, French and German) by Carl Theodor Dreyer. The film exists...
Stop-Loss
July 25, 2008
It has been almost ten years since Kimberly Peirce’s critically acclaimed, award-winning independent film, Boys Don’t Cry (1999). She’s returned with her first studio film – a drama about the current war in Iraq. So far, this kind of film has...
The Ruins: Unrated
July 21, 2008
The Ruins (2008) is the latest gruesome horror film with a xenophobic streak in the tradition of Hostel (2005) and Turistas (2006). Take a group of young, attractive American tourists, drop them into a strange, inhospitable country and punish them for...
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters: Criterion Collection
July 14, 2008
Initially, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) seems like the odd man out in writer/director Paul Schrader’s filmography. It takes a complex look at the life of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima who ended his own life by committing the ritual act of...
The Furies
July 7, 2008
Director Anthony Mann made the important transition from film noir B movies to westerns in 1950 with three films: Winchester ’73, Devil’s Doorway, and The Furies. The last film was an ambitious big budget mix of western and women’s melodrama with...
