Recent disks offer a range of horror movies displaying commercial and artier approaches to the genre from Vincent Price vehicles from American-International to Roger Vadim’s visually rich LeFanu adaptation …et mourir de plaisir and Bill Gunn’s key Black Cinema offering from 1973, Ganja & Hess.
Wanting to make a comedy to end all comedy, in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, serious-minded Stanley Kramer produced a bloated compendium of comedy styles which stubbornly refused to be funny.
Criterion’s excellent edition of King of the Hill (1993) and The Underneath (1995) throws some interesting light of the development of Steven Soderbergh as a filmmaker.
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […]
Elio Petri’s 1970 masterpiece Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion provides one of the most incisive dissections of the pathology of power ever committed to film.
The concept of genre is endlessly malleable, permitting filmmakers to borrow, invent, mix and match narrative elements to create a seemingly inexhaustible array of stories which combine familiar elements in new, or not so new, ways.