Hi, Mom! (1970)

A product of its times as well as being a statement on its times, Hi, Mom! (1970) is a free-wheeling satire of middle-class values. A young Robert De Niro plays Jon, a returned Vietnam vet in New Yorl who veers from one obsession to the next, beginning as a budding pornographer who wants to create “Peep […]

Dolemite Is My Name (2019)

For me, Dolemite Is My Name (2019) was a good time. I was predisposed to like it because of the writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. They wrote one of my favourite movies, Ed Wood, and the easy comparison was that this was a Blaxploitation version of that biopic. There’s a similar structure with supporting […]

Creepshow (1982)

When I was a kid, I stayed up one night to watch Creepshow (1982) – director George A Romero and writer Stephen King’s tribute to old EC horror comics – and it spooked me even though I thought I could handle it. Rewatching it after Romero passed away, I loved it – it feels like […]

Little Sister (2016)

Writer-director Zach Clark’s (White Reindeer, Vacation, Modern Love Is Automatic) film Little Sister (2016) is available to stream on Netflix. Small, stylish, empathetic and intriguing, it’s about an ex-goth turned nun (Addison Timlin) returning to her family in North Carolina after her brother (Keith Poulson) returns from the war a scarred shut-in. The sequence where […]

Spirits Of The Dead (1968)

Following Lewis Rice O’Donnell’s recommendation, I watched Spirits Of The Dead (1968; Italian: Tre passi nel delirio, French: Histoires extraordinaires), a omnibus film of three stories based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe by different directors. The first starring Jane Fonda and directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim is about a debauched countess who becomes obsessed […]