This week Guest Star Ruilin Fan writes about the Chinese historical drama, Nirvana in Fire. ~~~ In the evening of August 12, 2015, a series of deadly explosions tore through the east of Tianjin, a major city some 200 kilometers away from the Chinese capital, and shook the […]
Low-budget, but high audacity, and maybe sometimes just high, Charles Band’s Full Moon production company made fun, schlocky, direct-to-video horror and sci-fi its hallmark through a couple iterations in the 1990s, loading Blockbuster shelves full of guilty pleasures and fan favorites like Puppet Master and Trancers. And while […]
It’s hard to write about this movie. Attempts are usually defeated by a combination of dissolving into squees, dance breaks, and the weird contradiction of knowing absolutely nothing about it while simultaneously notating an ever-growing list of why it’s so good. In brief, James Bond 777 (1971, directed […]
I try to keep a healthy agnosticism about reboots, remakes, and adaptations. No matter how a story starts, every version that can be made will be, and every version will ultimately be its own thing. Plus, it’s interesting to see what elements of a work translate most persistently […]
I’m not one for star signs, but some alignments are too perfect to be overlooked even by a skeptic; and so we celebrate May 26 and 27 as the shared birthday of a very special trio of actors: Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, and Peter Cushing. Masters of their […]
Bombay Talkies, released in 2013 to mark the centennial of Indian feature filmmaking, is not just another film about the film industry. This anthology project keeps its focus on the power of cinema for audiences. The four contributing directors represent different vibes, maybe even genres, within the current […]