Originally published at Green Cine Daily, whose hyperlinks are left intact here.
Most film festivals are just film festivals. Fantastic Fest is a different beast. The premier American outpost on the global “fantastic cinema” circuit of festivals—devoted to all things action, horror, sci-fi and cult—FF spurts forth like a bottomless fountain of arterial spray for a week every autumn. This mutant brainchild of gonzo exhibitor Tim League and Ain’t It Cool News geek guru Harry Knowles has evolved over the past five years into a singular cinematic freak magnet.
What other major …

When people talk about “the British gangster film” these days, what they talk about is the post-gangster film. Not the Guy Ritchie crap, but gleefully malicious, verbally acrobatic, horrifically violent and oddly comic films like In Bruges and Sexy Beast – in which Cockney thugs disperse themselves upon the European Continent in a bid to get away from all that, only to come face to face with what they fear the most.
Newly released by Criterion, The Hit (1984) is an underappreciated gem that supplied the template for this mini-genre. Directed …

This is the extended remix of an interview that originally appeared at Stop Smiling Online.
Milos Forman answers the phone, and the hectoring cadence of MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews is audible in the background of his Connecticut home. He briefly says hello and turns down the volume.
I see you’re hooked on the political channel.
Yes.
What did you make of the elections?
Well, it was entertaining to watch, it was very interesting. It made me feel good about the whole democratic process here. Hearing so many opinions from so many sides. It was …

Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
Lars von Trier has said that Antichrist was made out of the psychological tar pit of a grave depression, that it was an artistic lifeline when he felt unsure that he would ever make another film again. This could explain some of the outrageously nasty torments visited on its only characters: a historian writing a book on witchcraft (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her psychiatrist husband (Willem Dafoe). In an opening sequence — so lushly imagined in creamy black-and-white that you’d think the fiercely ascetic von Trier …

Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
With the real-life Austrian android-turned-politico Arnold Schwarzenegger struggling to terminate California’s cash crisis, the notion of a fourth Terminator film, set in a meticulously annihilated post-apocalyptic vision of the Golden State, is juicily ironic. It’s easy to image some laid-off breadwinner herding the brood out of his foreclosed suburban tract house for a day at the multiplex, gazing upon the $200 million, CGI-wizarded wreckage, and thinking, “Hey, that doesn’t look so bad.”
Visually, at least, T4 is stunning: The year 2018 looks like Hell on a …

Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
A nation of suburban dads working through their mid-rock crises through repeat big-screen flat panel viewings of This Is Spinal Tap and VH-1 rockumentaries has necessarily lowered expectations for the fret-wizard power summit occasioned by the new documentary It Might Get Loud. I say “documentary” because it’s a non-fiction work. But the film’s lavish production values, transcontinental location jumping, blockbuster producer (The Dark Knight’s Thomas Tull), and handpicked Oscar-winning director (Davis Guggenheim of An Inconvenient Truth) actually suggest something more like a presentation.
“Electric guitar is …

Every year at the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic in Sitges, Spain, there’s one movie that generates instant notoriety. In previous years, gore-drenched European shockers like Inside and Martyrs have prompted more than gasps from audiences. People flee the theater, get sick to their stomachs, even require a trip to the emergency room. Or so goes the legend.
This year’s barf-bag classic was, hands-down, The Human Centipede. The warped brainchild of affable Dutch filmmaker Tom Six is equal parts The Breed-era Cronenberg, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Vanishing, and some …