When Burt Lancaster began his career as an actor, it appeared this was going to be a career in the mold of Errol Flynn or Randolph Scott. In films like The Flame and the Arrow, Jim Thorpe-All American, The Crimson Pirate, Vera Cruz, Ten Tall Men, From Here to Eternity, The Kentuckian, Trapeze, Gunfight at [...]
DIRECTED BY: Peter Jackson
FEATURING: Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon
PLOT: A murdered 14-year old girl watches her family search for her killer from the
afterlife.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There are a few weird visual elements in Susie’s pleasant and candy-colored Purgatory, but The Lovely Bones tells a conventional, if unusual, [...]
DIRECTED BY: William Friedkin
FEATURING: Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr.
PLOT: A lonely and none-too-bright waitress with a tragic past and an abusive ex-con
ex-husband takes up with a mysterious man who is convinced that their ramshackle motel room is infested by bugs.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Bug is a well-acted, claustrophobic and dramatic exploration [...]
DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier
FEATURING: William Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg
PLOT: After the death of their only child, a therapist takes his grieving and anxiety-
ridden wife to a retreat in the woods to face her irrational fears; when they arrive, nature itself seems determined to drive them both mad.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Actually, von Trier’s troubled [...]
“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.”–George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater
FEATURING: Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delphy
PLOT: An unnamed young man appears to be drifting from dream to dream, each animated in a different style. His dreams involve him talking to various college [...]
DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Alter
FEATURING: Anton Pardoe, Roselyn Sanchez, Patrick Bauchau
PLOT: In a dark, nameless city, a man must return to a city in which he is despised to
save the life of “the one who got away.” He must travel to the rotten heart of this noirish nightscape to get her back, putting his life at [...]
Every time a prestigious film institute puts together an official, stamped with authority list of “The Greatest Films of All Time” their number one pick is going to be Citizen Kane. No surprises there. Such lists might as well be packaged and sold as a 1.2.3 paint- by- number set. Ironically, it was the granddaddy [...]
“It was just an extra splash of weird. We decided it wasn’t weird enough to begin with, so what can we really do to make this weird?”–Kiowa Winans on Ink’s DVD commentary [explaining why the Incubi staves end in human hands]
DIRECTED BY: Jamin Winans
FEATURING: Chris Kelly, Quinn Hunchar, Jessica Duffy, Jeremy Make, Jennifer Batter
PLOT: [...]
DIRECTED BY: Victor Salva
FEATURING: Sean Patrick Flanery, Lance Henriksen, Jeff Goldblum, Mary Steenburgen
PLOT: A supernaturally gifted teen misfit fights against the grain when he is forcibly
integrated into a callous, backward community.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: A strange blend of fantasy and drama, Powder has shadings of The Enigma of Casper Hauser (1975), Carrie (1976), and The [...]
DIRECTED BY: Chan-wook Park
FEATURING: Kang-ho Song, Ok-vin Kim, Hae-sook Kim
PLOT: A priest becomes a vampire after he receives a blood transfusion during an
experimental treatment to find a cure for a deadly virus; after his transformation he becomes erotically obsessed with a young woman who lives as a virtual slave to the family that adopted her.
WHY [...]
