The Headless Woman (2008)

I always loved that in their Criterion Closet YouTube video, Lucrecia Martel selected Carnival Of Souls and said something to the effect of, that it was enough to make one film if it was as great as that. Only after I had watched Martel’s film, The Headless Woman (2008), did I see its connection to […]

Galveston (2018)

I’m an easy mark for a neo-noir thriller and Galveston (2018) intrigued me because it was directed by Melanie Laurent. Best known as Shosanna in Inglorious Basterds, Laurent has directed several films in France and this is her only English-language American film (so far), an adaptation of a novel by Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of […]

The Net (1995)

I’ve seen the trailer for The Net (1995) a zillion times but never actually watched it from start to finish, and now having seen it, I almost didn’t need to. This is the definition of an average two star movie – watchable enough, but nothing that really sticks to your MEMORY dot RAM etc, zing. […]

After The Storm (2016)

One evening, I was looking for something soothing and gentle for a movie, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After The Storm (2016; Umi yori mo Mada Fukaku) worked its charms on me. I’ve only seen Kore-eda’s Shoplifters and that had me bawling at the end, with its displays of human kindness and compassion in an unjust world. […]

Scanners III: The Takeover (1991)

When they came to the third entry in the Scanners franchise – based on David Croenenberg’s original film where a strain of people in Canada are born with psychic powers due to government experimentation in drugs given to expectant mothers – they were really having fun with the possibilities here: What if a pigeon annoyed […]