Fred Zinnemann (United Kingdom, 1966)   “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?” To what lengths would you go to maintain a principle, a belief?  Sir Thomas More sacrificed his own head for refusing to betray his conscience.  His unparalleled steadfastness and nobility in [...]

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Michael Crichton, October 23 1942 – November 4 2008 Thank you for all you gave us during your time here.

Tomas Alfredson (Sweden, 2008) A vampire film that doesn’t just deliver blood, but heart as well. What really distinguishes the film from other vampire movies is the touching moments that occur between the two central characters: Oskar, a blond 12-year-old boy who gets bullied a lot at school, and Eli, a girl with dark hair [...]

.: SciFi-ActionMan’s 2008 Pumpkin Carving Thread :. Congrats, SFAM, for being featured on the news in Washington, D.C.! Click here to view the news footage from MyFox Washington DC; click here to view the photo gallery. Here’s the link to the Oct 23rd news article about his pumpkin art. Visit FantasyPumpkins.com to see more of [...]

Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza (Spain, 2007) The movie definitely scared me and I had several jump in my seat moments and a few gasps. There does seem to be a growing trend towards the first person handheld camera point-of-view in horror films as of late: Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead are other recent films [...]

Edgar G. Ulmer (USA, 1934) This is the first time that Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi starred together in a film. After a bus accident, a newlywed couple vacationing in Hungary are taken to the home of a mad architect (Karloff) by their travel companion, a psychiatrist, who they met on a train (Lugosi). Soon [...]

Michael Reeves (UK, 1968) Vincent Price stars, playing a character loosely based on a real life Englishman who lived in the mid 17th century named Matthew Hopkins, who was a witchhunter and prosecutor. The film is regarded by many, and Price himself, as his finest performance on film, and he really delivers. His character is [...]

aka: The Mask of Satan Mario Bava (Italy, 1960) A strikingly atmospheric gothic horror from acclaimed director Mario Bava (his first feature), in which an executed Satanic witch and her henchmen are resurrected two centuries later to terrorize an aristocratic family out of vengeance for her death, as well as to claim the body of [...]

Jerzy Kawalerowicz (Poland, 1961) Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, the film is based on true events that occurred in the 17th century referred to as “The Possession of Loudun” in which Ursuline nuns at a French convent in the town of Loudun were alleged to have been [...]

Wolke Neun (Dresen, 2008), Germany At the first sight of exposed wrinkly flesh, someone in the audience I was with said out loud “what the heck is this?” That was about seven minutes into the film, and the characters were about to engage in some naked, older adulterous affair, one that has not been seen [...]

It would be very difficult for the Coens to top “No Country For Old Men”, and they didn’t. I mean, we see a film that has the Coen Brother’s name on it and it’s usually going to equal gold. These guys are amazingly talented, but I wouldn’t say this is anywhere close to their best [...]

SPOILERS ALERT 3:10 to Yuma (Mangold, 2007) could have been great. It could have been about a perverse desire of the Good Man to be the criminal he sought to bring justice to, the man who could take what he could and feel free of judgment or ties to a simple life. At one point, [...]

Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others; von Donnersmarck, 2006) Germany This German film won the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Picture the year it released (2006). It came out of nowhere and beat out the front-runner Pan’s Labyrinth for the prize. It shocked me at the time, but having seen the film now [...]

This wasn’t supposed to happen. My first front page review here at Icine, something I’d slightly anticipated, thinking it’d begin with Fleck’s ‘Half Nelson’, or with Lynch’s sweet and simple ‘The Straight Story.’ Now here I am reviewing a film that wasn’t even on my radar before last night, only knowing it as the one [...]

LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — The summer movie season appears to have climbed the $4 billion box-office mountain a few days earlier than expected, reaching that milestone for the first time ever. Preliminary weekend figures show that the industry narrowly crossed the $4 billion threshold over the weekend, according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers. Paul [...]

Director SPIKE LEE has vowed to continue highlighting the plight of Hurricane Katrina victims with a follow-up documentary about the 2005 disaster. The moviemaker’s original offering, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, attracted huge critical acclaim for its frank look at the disaster and its aftermath. It featured footage which many news [...]

Kowalski is delivering the star of the movie, the white 1970 Dodge Challenger, from Colorado to San Francisco. Pumped up on speed (the drug, not velocity), he decides to drive it as fast as he can. Kowalski is the hero with a mysterious past that is slowly revealed in flashbacks over the course of the [...]

Like any Bond film, Casino Royale is given context not only by the period in which it was made, but by the films that directly preceded it. The Brosnan films to which Casino Royale is the heir slowly disintegrated from enjoyable camp to not-so-enjoyable schlock, the nadir of which may have been the casting of [...]

Grindhouse (Rodriguez & Tarantino, 2007) Watching Grindhouse, it was clear to me who was the one with the big ego: his name wasn’t Robert Rodriguez. While Rodriguez settled for a blast-from-the-past film-to-film transfer, Tarantino made a Tarantino film – probably his most peculiar one yet, and one that, if anything, established once and for all [...]