Future’s past
Kraftwerk does it with machines that travel in time
The last jazz purist
Larry Smith tells it like it is and plays it like it lays.
Almost Heroes
There’s a difference between a stupid movie and a movie populated by stupid characters, and director Christopher Guest shows that distinction with Almost Heroes. Guest (Waiting for Guffman, The Big Picture) has constructed a broad parody of frontier-western films and historical documentaries while still staying true to their peculiar conventions. During the opening credits –…
The Beyond
Cult director Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981), newly reissued in a crisply atmospheric print, is a tasty example of the Italian school of post-Romero gore flick, a rickety construction of patchwork plotting and barely functional dubbing which can still tap into such primal dreads as the fear of disfigurement, the return of the resentful dead…
Nil by Mouth
Ever wonder how actor Gary Oldman can play weirdos and madmen with such conviction? Well, here’s your answer, all laid out in lurid detail. Working from memories of his childhood in South London, Oldman delivers a semiautobiographical portrait of a family on the perpetual skids. There’s Ray (Ray Winstone), a tough-talking, hard-drinking creeper who dabbles…
A Perfect Murder
Movie remakes tend to be a dubious lot. Their effectiveness as models of an original film’s statement of theme is usually limited by the passing of years and social conventions. Andrew Davis’ redux of Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder is no different. One of Hitch’s main projects during his prime was to plunder unorthodox subjects,…
