Friday One Sheet: 1923
The star-system is not quite dead. Today we are stepping out of the usual 'movie poster' space, albeit looking below, you would never know it. 1923 is prequel series to long-running (and highly franchise-able, apparently) neo-western Yellowstone. Helen Mirren and...
Friday One Sheet: WHITE NOISE
Like a cross between Mort Drucker's dense caricature work for Mad Magazine, the Where's Waldo? children's books, and the board game Scotland Yard, illustrator Marija Tiurina's key art for White Noise is a helluva thing. Tiurina has done several of...
Review: THE FABELMANS, Dreams Can Also Be Fun
Dreams are scary. In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg puts his own childhood up on the big screen, through the Dream Factory, with the help of many of his regular collaborators, including screenwriter Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln), John Williams (Jaws, Indiana...
Friday One Sheet: INSIDE
I love a good teaser poster, and these three pieces of key art for Vasilis Katsoupis' debut feature deliver a satisfying tease. The film, Inside, is a one man, one room heist film starring Willem Dafoe, who slowly goes crazy after...
Friday One Sheet: TIN & TINA
There is a lot going on in this key art for Tin & Tina by Spanish artist and designer Pedro Cabañas: the classic book frame, the children's prayer, the costumes, masks, feathers, finger-of-god lighting, sharp implements, and the bleeding heart on...
Friday One Sheet: LAMBORGHINI
I am not much of a car guy, but even I spotted that on the poster for Lamborghini, there is a Ferrari. An inside joke. The legendary designer and entrepreneur (and wine maker) Ferruccio Lamborghini owned a lot of Ferrari's...
Friday One Sheet: EDEN
This is the second time Villuti Creative Studio (the studio that did the exceptional key art for Dennis Villeneuve's Enemy) has been featured for Spanish eco-spa horror picture Edén. While the first one featured the vastness of the wilderness, the...
Review: WENDELL & WILD, A Stop-Motion Roller Coaster
“One scream, and my parents were gone.” After an abrupt car crash (aren’t they all?) a very young girl, Kat, loses her loving, independent and artistic parents. She ends up in “the system,” a series of orphanages and youth detention...
Friday One Sheet: SINGLE MOTHER
The key art for Lenara Serazheva's short film, Single Mother, offers a stark, simple image that conveys a lot with a little. Reminiscent of the classic scene from Kon Satoshi's Perfect Blue, which was later appropriated by Darren Aronofsky in...
Friday One Sheet: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992) Re-Release
If you are old enough to remember the summer 1992, there was the coordinated series of 'viral' (although that would not have been the word used then) marketing posters and graffiti of a shadowy 3 headed bust, sometimes by itself,...
Review: DEAD FOR A DOLLAR, Character Actor Goodness in a B-Western Package
In his 1962 essay, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," critic Manny Farber comes firmly down on the side of filmmakers and actors who are completely at odds with the zeitgeist or trends, and nibble away at the edges of...
Friday One Sheet: CORSAGE
Due to the hubbub of TIFF last week, this one slipped under the radar, so I am circling back around to it now. Marie Kreutzer's fictional account of the 40th birthday of Empress Elisabeth of Austria grapples with notions of...
Toronto 2022 Review: DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA
Hospitals are places of miracles and horrors. They are also places of office politics, temporary domestic spaces, and a kind of body-repair shop. The reason why there are so many television medical dramas, is that everything about these places is...
Toronto 2022 Review: UNREST, A Most Unconventional Biopic
A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. Cyril Schäublin’s deep dive into nineteenth century Swiss watchmaking, the business and the labour, alongside the nascent political movement that was...
Toronto 2022 Review: VIKING, Mars In Absurdia
If you follow the arc of Mars in the last hundred years of cinema, it’s representation evolves from a dreamscape utopian fantasy of early silent cinema, a place where anything was possible, to a swamp of horrors and creatures during...
Toronto 2022 Review: THE FABELMANS, Spielberg on Spielberg
Dreams are scary. In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg puts his own childhood up on the big screen, through the Dream Factory, with the help many of his regular collaborators, screenwriter Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln), John Williams (Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic...
Toronto 2022 Review: SISU, Really Really Really Loves Blowing Up Nazis
With its wide-screen sky and endlessly empty tundra, Lapland makes a surprisingly able analogue for the American West. Finnish director Jalmari Helander is not exactly interested in making Once Upon in Time in Lapland here, but he certainly enjoys the...
Friday One Sheet: L'IMMENSITA
A quick one this week from Venice, where at the big film festivals, the Movie Star is alive and well. This festival teaser for Emanuele Crialese's period set love story L'immensità, offers the visage of Penelope Cruz either deep in...
Toronto 2022 Review: PACIFICTION, Paranoia and Politics Play in Polynesia
“This is my office, and it is always trying to kill me,” pontificates the High Commissioner, a man named De Roller, as he grandstands, slinks, and politics though his duties in Albert Serra’s paranoid, sun dappled enigma. If only our...
Review: In SALOUM, Rules Are Bent and Broken With Aplomb
Yann Gael, Evelyne Ily Juhen and Roger Sallah star in a thriller from Senegal, directed by Jean Luc Herbulot, and now streaming on Shudder.
