Category: Screen

Ek Paheli Leela: When a B-Movie Goes Good

When I was recently asked for my recommendation for the most underrated Bollywood film of 2015, I didn’t go with the high-profile, high-intelligence, period piece flops from big-name directors that I loved even though very few critics did (Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! from Dibakar Banerjee and Bombay Velvet from […]

Some kind of help

Robots. Sure, if we get it wrong they might take over the world and force us to serve them buffets of edible oil products and fancy electric cocktails, but they have the potential to be so cute and helpful. For every Terminator or I, Robot army that would […]

For Evermore: The Raven (1963)

Carol Borden has been summoned to mysterious gathering of sorcerers in a haunted castle this week and so she is covering herself with a non-comics piece about the 1963 film, The Raven. One of my favorite things about American International Productions is their opening credit sequences. While low-budget, […]

Time loops and the failures of memory

Memory is an unreliable narrator. It seems so absolutely sure of itself when it’s telling you things that it’s easy to forget it can’t wholly be trusted. There are always gaps and discrepancies, sections that get revised in light of subsequent events or reshaped to soften the sharpest […]

A Short History of Hellmouths

Living just outside the gates of hell is a very convenient plot device. It handily solves the narrative challenge of providing a plausibly endless supply of demons and evil beasties for a protagonist to fight, and it’s not like hell ever goes away. Maybe you get lucky and […]