Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (2010) began as a couple of shorts (2003 and 2005) which were a success on the Internet. In the form of industrial training films, they depicted the hunting, taming, and training of wild Santa Clauses in Northern Finland. These are strong, rather vicious creatures which end up being marketed around the […]
Nostalgia can be an odd thing. As I’ve been working on my documentary about the history of movie-going in Winnipeg, and thinking about how much time I spent in the old theatres which no longer exist, and what it felt like to sit down in the dark to see something I’d heard or read about […]
There are two main types of time travel story. The first treats time as little more than another spatial dimension, with the traveler heading off to see something in the past or future as if going to another country. H.G Wells’ The Time Machine was of this type, the title machine essentially just a device […]
Dark Of The Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968) The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, responsible for the dazzling imagery of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), and Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), among many others, was also a director. One of my earliest […]
In the past year or so I’ve seen five “evil kids” horror movies. Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan (2009) uses the classic “cuckoo” storyline: a couple with one young child decide to adopt a needy orphan, in this case a strangely moody girl. It’s not long before she begins to torment the couple’s biological child, not to […]
If I’m in a room talking to someone and there happens to be a bookcase nearby, or a shelf of DVDs, I become easily distracted from the conversation as I try to read titles to get some idea of the other person’s tastes and interests. A similar thing happens when I watch a movie: if […]
Rapidly developing video technologies are altering not just our expectations but also our responses to the experience of watching movies. Blu-ray, hi-def TVs, the digital technologies which are used more and more in production – all have helped to create particular standards which many viewers now apply to virtually everything they watch. A lot of […]
As a longtime admirer and fan of Terrence Malick’s work, I’ve been hesitant to write about The Tree of Life because it’s the first of his films that I haven’t loved at first sight. There are many things I liked about it on a first viewing, but there are other things which don’t seem to […]
In the 1960s several factors came together to change the way American politics was both played and perceived, and the journalist Theodore H. White played an important role in the second part of that equation. With his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the President 1960, he brought the processes of presidential electoral politics out […]
Christopher Smith is an English director whose first feature, Creep (2004), was an attempt to emulate Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka Deathline, 1973) and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984); it had a woman trapped overnight in the London Underground, pursued by the mutant remnants of some medical experiments in a hidden lab, but it never quite […]