Category: Articles
BEWARE THE BLOB! 60 Years of Sci-Fi Horror’s Shapeless Alien
For most movie buffs, there are a few films that fascinated and scarred us in childhood, only for us to grow up and love them for entirely different reasons as adults. While there are a few such films for me, perhaps the first was 1958’s The Blob, a rather novel little film that introduced the…
AFI 2018 European Union Film Showcase: Part Four
The AFI EU Film Showcase concluded with a strong roster of films. In all, 49 movies from 25 countries played over the three weeks. (Sorry Luxembourg, Malta, and Sweden. Sweden’s Becoming Astrid did screen just before the festival, but its release date made it impossible to include in the festival proper.) If European movies interest…
AFI 2018 European Union Film Showcase: Part Three
Let’s jump straight into it, shall we? Here are six more interesting films that screened at the American Film Institute’s EU Film Showcase. Keep your eye out for these in 2019. Transit by Christian Petzold (Germany) If Michelangelo Antonioni replaced Michael Curtiz in the director’s chair for Casablanca, he may have come up with something…
AFI 2018 European Union Film Showcase: Part Two
The first full week of the 2018 AFI EU Film Showcase featured some frothier confections than the opening weekend, which I covered previously. More comedies and romances took center stage, but if some hit a little less hard than the selections from the opening weekend, many were no less interesting to watch. Love Revisited (Oude…
Celebrating 50 years of ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’
It was late March, 1972, and at the Olympia Theater on Broadway, New York film fans were eagerly anticipating a series of Cuban movies, kicked off by Humberto Solas’s historical epic Lucia. The screening was interrupted by a stink bomb – and by the appearance of rats – both reportedly the work of anti-Castro protestors.…