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The horror and the terror

Neil Marshall's acclaimed British horror-thriller "The Descent" draws on plenty of other genre classics for visual inspiration, from otherworldly mysteries ("Picnic at Hanging Rock") to oudoor adventure ("Deliverance," "Jaws") to science-fiction ("Alien") and straight-out horror ("The Blair Witch Project"). All…

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Cave paintings: The art of 'The Descent'

View image "The Flaming Spirits of the Evil Counsellors" (illustration for Dante's "Divine Comedy") Gustave Doré (1865) "The Descent" quotes from a whole bunch of movies (and I'll be illustrating some of those soon), but while watching it I was…

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'The Descent': The deeper ending

Here's an eye-opener... As you may know, "The Descent" (which opened in US theaters this weekend) was released last year in Great Britain, where it is now available on Region 2 PAL DVD. The British release has one final scene…

May contain spoilers

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Opening Shots: 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'

View image From Edward Bowie, US Army: I have a counter-intuitive nomination for best shot: The opening segue from the Paramount “mountain��? to the unspecified Andean mountain in “Raiders of the lost Ark.��? Indicative, I think, that what we are…

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Opening Shots: 'Man Push Cart'

A cacophonous industrial noise fills the darkness, illuminated by what seems to be some kind of flashing safety light behind a divider of scuffed, semi-opaque plastic strips. They ripple and part and a man appears -- his legs in tattered…

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Oliver Stone: What happened?

Nicolas Cage in "WTC." I'm still trying to figure out what to make of Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" (and what kind of movie Stone and Paramount thought they were making), but in the meantime I have an essay looking…

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Dr. Bordwell Goes to Hong Kong

View image Photo by David Bordwell When I met David Bordwell at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival last spring, he had recently returned from Hong Kong with a cool new Fuji FinePix camera, a model that wasn't available in the…