BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL
Boorman and the Devil is ostensibly about the blighted and bloated production of Exorcist II: The Heretic, which was released in 1977 to a litany of horrible reviews. But as it weaves its utterly fantastic web we come to…
COYOTE VS. ACME
From an ingenious humor piece by Ian Frazier that ran in the New Yorker magazine twenty-six years ago, a dedicated team of filmmakers and animators have rendered an ingenious and impressive feature, blending live-action and animation à la Who…
THE LAST PICTURE SHOWS
At first glance I thought I’d seen this kind of documentary before, eulogizing the golden age of movie palaces and the rise and fall of drive-ins. But filmmaker Rustin Thompson is focused on a different and distinct kind of…
FOUR NEW FILM BOOKS YOU OUGHT TO READ—AND OWN
I am all too aware that I haven’t been posting very much on my site, especially when it comes to film books, which continue to proliferate. I still intend to provide an overview of what is now—and soon to…
EVERYWHERE MAN: A DOC WORTH SINGING ABOUT
Every now and then a show-business documentary comes along that catches my fancy and lingers in my mind for days. Such a film is Peter Asher: Everywhere Man. If you’re old enough to remember the musical British invasion led by…
THE ROCKETEER SOARS AGAIN
Monday night a near sell-out crowd filled the El Capitan Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to see The Rocketeer on its 25th anniversary along with three of its principal creators: director Joe Johnston, production designer Jim Bissell, and executive producer Larry Franco. I…
PROTO-NOIR AND PRIME NOIR ON BLU-RAY
THE BIG COMBO – Ignite Films Joseph H. Lewis was a prolific director of B movies and episodic television, but his latter-day claim to fame is a virtuosic film noir, Gun Crazy (1950). When I first saw that film…
