overlooked

“You wanna do the world a real service? Tell funnier jokes.” More than anything else, it’s the breadth of Woody Allen‘s craft as a filmmaker that has never been fully recognized or appreciated. With a body of work varied enough to include “Love and Death,” “Interiors,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “Everyone Says I Love You,” […]

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I wasn’t ashamed in the slightest when I called “Jennifer’s Body” one of my favorite movies of last year. You read that right. I put it right up there with “A Single Man” and “The Road”. Surprised? So was I. But so much of “Jennifer’s Body” worked for me, dare I say all of it, […]

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There are movies which live in my childhood. Viewing them years later, no matter the length of time which may have passed, I’m instantly transported back in time to that darkened theater, fond memories, and childhood wonderment. Condorman, based on the James Bond spoof by Robert Sheckley, is one of those films. From the Pink […]

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Why “Pontypool” didn’t become a huge cult hit during its initial theatrical release is beyond me. It got good reviews from critics who know what they’re talking about (Noel Murray, Kim Newman, Mark Kermode and David Edelstein, to name a few). It made a good run on the festival circuit, playing at both SXSW and […]

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William Peter Blatty is famous for having written The Exorcist. Regretfully, his popular notoriety tends to end there.  At the risk of coming across as hyperbolic and nerdy, I’ll say that it is altogether distressing to me that a work of his called The Ninth Configuration (a.k.a. Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane) doesn’t often come up […]

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“How could guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?” The bracing melancholy of childhood is an underrepresented phenomenon in popular entertainment. By and large, children’s films prefer to coast by, parading antiquated, uninteresting archetypes and reducing all conflict to clinical action sequences devoid of substance or originality (see: Tim Burton’s […]

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Coming off of the disastrous critical and box office reception to Showgirls in 1995, director Paul Verhoeven decided to return to the science fiction genre he was best known for, adapting Robert Heinlein’s much-revered, juvenile-oriented novel “Starship Troopers.” Verhoeven was known for the hyper-violent “RoboCop” and “Total Recall,” so filmgoers were ready for giant bugs […]

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“Take the greatest Jewish minds ever: Marx, Freud, Einstein. What have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality, and the atom bomb.” “The Believer” contains one of the most compelling portraits of a psychologically unstable young man ever captured on film. Where “American History X” explicated racism and inter-cultural hostilities as products of social circumstances and […]

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