Writer. Film Scholar. Journalist. Editor.
Ever since the image of a woman’s eyeball being sliced with a razor was dreamt up by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a whole renegade strand of cinema has delighted in brutally assaulting its audience, violently forcing it to face the gory nature of the body and the mulchy depths of the psyche. The cinematic... Continue Reading →
An unholy hybrid of Otto Preminger’s Laura and Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack!, Nikos Nikolaïdis’s delirious Greek-tragedy-inflected sado-masochistic comedy noir Singapore Sling is one of those wondrous alien objects that excitingly tear through the cinematographic sky once in a while. It remains the most famous of Nikolaïdis’s films outside of Greece, even though he made eight theatrical... Continue Reading →
In our age of information overload, it is rare to stumble upon a truly unknown artistic movement, so the rediscovery of the 3rd Eye Group, the only 1970s Israeli counter-cultural movement, is all the more exciting. Founded and led by maverick artist and filmmaker Jacques Katmor, it shook up Israeli society for a few short... Continue Reading →
The work of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz may at first appear wildly disparate, ranging as it does from a ghost story (The Ghost and Mrs Muir, 1947), to a satire of the show-business world (All about Eve, 1950), a Shakespeare adaptation (Julius Caesar, 1953), a four-hour historical epic (Cleopatra, 1963), a murder mystery (The Honey... Continue Reading →
The history of cinema is littered with unfinished grand projects by megalomaniac directors including Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Erich von Stroheim. That Henri-Georges Clouzot should be added to this list seems, at first, surprising. One of France’s greatest directors, he established his reputation with tight, economical, superbly crafted crime thrillers throughout the 40s and... Continue Reading →
After producing Alejandro Jodorowsky’s incendiary first feature Fando y Lis (1968) as well as El topo (1970), Juan López Moctezuma went behind the camera in 1971 to make The Mansion of Madness (released in 1973), which was loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. He followed it up with two vampire stories, Mary, Mary,... Continue Reading →
Against the depressing backdrop of a French cinema determined to be as glossy and brain-dead as Hollywood, 13 (Tzameti), the 2006 first feature by young French-educated Georgian director Gela Babluani, still stands out two years later as one of the most exciting lo-fi black and white Gallic debuts since Luc Besson’s Le dernier combat. In... Continue Reading →
Despite being one of the most accomplished, intelligent and adventurous filmmakers to come out of Japan in recent years, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has inexplicably been ignored in this country. With the overrated Ring spawning a seemingly unquenchable thirst for anything that more or less fitted the ‘J-horror’ label, it looked like Kurosawa came to maturity just... Continue Reading →
Too often put in the same bag as the cynical, Hollywood-engineered wave of blaxploitation flicks it influenced, Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is pure, unadulterated ghetto anger that burns as fiercely now as when it was made over thirty years ago. Having started a filmmaking career in France with the support of Henri... Continue Reading →
Virginie Sélavy 