Festivals & Awards
Sundance 2020: His House, The Night House
A review of two horror films that had their world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
A review of two horror films that had their world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
A review of Jim Jarmusch's new film with Bill Murray and Adam Driver.
A tribute to the legendary B-movie writer and director, Larry Cohen.
Over two dozen underrated horror movies for your Halloween marathon planning.
A look back at the 1946 Powell & Pressburger film, which has now received a special 4K restoration from the Criterion Collection.
The irony of being destroyed by the thing you helped create would not have been lost on a studio responsible for some of the finest film versions of Frankenstein.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterworks continues with a celebration of the late George Romero and "Survival of the Dead."
Matt writes: Chaz Ebert commemorated the 25th anniversary of her marriage to Roger on July 18th by republishing his unforgettable essay, "Roger Loves Chaz." She accompanied the post with various rarely seen wedding photos as well as the following video embedded below (entitled Joy).
A tribute to the late horror filmmaker, George Romero.
A profile on RogerEbert.com writer Susan Wloszczyna.
John Carpenter's 80s SF film may have outdated technology and outdated hair, but it hasn't aged a day.
The movie questionnaire and 2015 reviews of RogerEbert.com film critic Susan Wloszczyna.
Sheila writes: Nelson Carvajal and Jed Mayer, over at Press Play, present a video and an essay about the "scary summer" of 1979. It's a beautiful blend of autobiography and cultural and film memories from that particular summer. Jed Mayer writes: "As tag-lines go, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead sports a pretty good one: 'When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth.' I stared for weeks at the lurid poster bearing these ominous words. It hung in the front windows of the Maplewood Mall multiplex. Looking back, I think a more fitting tag-line might have come from a speech given by President Jimmy Carter later that same summer: 'Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. What can we do?'" Well worth a look!
Writer Susan Wloszczyna responds to our Movie Love Questionnaire.
UPDATED (08/01/12): Scroll to the bottom of this entry to see my first impressions of the newly announced critics' and directors' poll results.
Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" (1948) topped the first Sight & Sound critics' poll in 1952, only four years after it was first released, dropped to #7 in 1962, and then disappeared from the top ten never to be seen again. (In 2002 only five of the 145 participating critics voted for it.) Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) flopped in its initial release but was rediscovered in the 1950s after RKO licensed its films to television in 1956. From 1962 to 2002 "Kane" has remained at the top of the poll (46 critics voted for it last time). This year, a whopping 846 top-ten ballots (mentioning 2,045 different titles) were counted, solicited from international "critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles" -- including bloggers and other online-only writers. Sight & Sound has announced it will live-tweet the 2012 "Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time" (@SightSoundmag #sightsoundpoll) August 1, and as I write this the night before, I of course don't know the results. But, for now at least, I'm more interested in the process.
Given the much wider and younger selection of voters in 2012, ist-watchers have been speculating: Will another movie (leading candidate: Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," number 2 in 2002) supplant "Kane" at the top of the list? Will there be any silent films in the top 10? (Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" and Murnau's "Sunrise" tied for #7 on the 2002 list, but the latter was released in 1927 with a Fox Movietone sound-on-film musical score and sound effects.)
Though there's been no rule about how much time should pass between a film's initial release and its eligibility (the Library of Congress's National Film Registry requires that selections be at least ten years old), most of the selections ten to have stood the test of time for at least a decade or two. The newest film on the 2002 list was the combination of "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather, Part II" (1974) -- but they won't be allowed to count as one title for 2012.
