Ti West’s fourth motion picture undertaking, 2009’s The House of the Devil is an ’80s-style horror film clearly inspired by the classic shockers of yesteryear, and it even begins with a grindhouse-style opening title sequence that would make Quentin Tarantino smile. West wanted to emulate the likes of “The Amityville Horror” and “The Texas Chain…
La traición, la lujuria, la familia y el amor. Those are popular themes in Spanish soaps. For native speakers, backstabbing spouses, a secret romance between married individuals, and conflicted family men are sources of entertainment. But I’m sure they realize how convoluted and silly the onscreen drama is. There’s a lot to poke fun at…
An Arab sheikh with more money than sense wants to import the sport and/or lifestyle of salmon fishing from cold and rainy Scotland to the barren desert of Yemen. In the meantime, the British government is floundering from scandal to scandal and greedily seizes upon the idea of a cultural rapprochement between the West and…
Claustrophobia is one fear we all have. Human beings love being able to move about and frolic. In fact, I love it so much that even riding a crowded train can become painful experience. So it’s surprising that the thought of being trapped inside a box has never crossed my mind. That is to say,…
Fear in real time. That’s the most tantalizing hook the horror genre has offered since “The Blair Witch Project” opened the “found footage” floodgates more than a dozen years ago. That genre reinvention eventually led to the 2007 Spanish horror masterpiece “[Rec],” my pick for the scariest movie of the past decade. That movie was…
With a built-in audience of mostly 14-17 year-old girls, director Gary Ross (“Pleasantville,” “Seabiscuit”) puts forth The Hunger Games — a rather faithful version of the first novel in Suzanne Collins’ best-selling trilogy, telling the tale of a post-apocalyptic North America divided into 12 districts. And with the country having gone through a rebellion years…
The poet Rilke said, “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. Here something blooms; from out of a silent crevice an unknowing weed emerges singing into existence.” The unknowing weed takes its time to sing but sing it does in director Anh Dung Tran’s film Norwegian Wood, his first since “Vertical Ray of the…
