The initial success of Brannon Braga and Adam Simon’s series “Salem” (2015-2017) and the staggering impact of Robert Eggers’ “The Witch” seems to have made American Puritans into high fashion for horror entertainment. Director Martin Koolhoven and producer Els Vandevorst had, for several years before the releases of the aforementioned titles, been producing their own…
Like a lonely, mysterious gunslinger from the Old West, a tall, slender rugged-looking man with a thick mustache comes to a small Bulgarian village near the Grecian border as part of a German work crew in Valeska Grisebach’s (“Longing”) Western. The man is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), in Bulgaria to work on a hydroelectric power station…
It is not often that one has reservations about a movie adaptation of an epic Stephen King novel series. Sure, there have been a few misses along the way (bound to happen considering how large King’s bibliography is), but it has been quite some time that a movie-going mishap has registered so profoundly as it…
Filmmaker Sofia Coppola is a mixed bag in terms of her big screen artistry as both an actress and movie-making siren. Specifically, Coppola’s auteur skills can run rather cold and dismissive (penning the flat and forgettable costume saga “Marie Antoinette”) or can inspire unexpected hypnotic greatness of roguish contemplation and isolation (as demonstrated in her…
Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven is set in a world where even having a drink requires vigilance. The film opens with Bartholomew Bogue’s (Peter Sarsgaard, “Black Mass”) hostile takeover of Rose Creek, a small mining community. This results in the deaths of countless settlers — most notably Matthew Cullen (Matt Bomer, “The Nice Guys”), whose…
Kill or be Killed (originally “Red on Yella, Kill a Fella”) is the kind of movie you want to root for: A genre bending romp across West Texas that has everything from spaghetti/western tropes like combination brothel-saloons, flasks of whiskey passed around fires, and shootouts everywhere from chain gangs to churchyards, to horror related elements…
Dedicated to David Jones Nature is not a survivor. Nature neither lives nor dies; it is in nature where everything that lives dies, and it is in it that everything that lives fights for survival. Nature is therefore the place of survival, but it is also its witness. For this is no inert space. More…
