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Nothing is more terrifying than sitting in anticipation in the dark waiting for that unexpected jump scare mastered over the decades by directors who have defined the horror genre since the 1920s with spooky monsters, ghoulish demons and scream queens.

Directors like Hitchcock, Craven, and Carpenter have set the standard for the genre as rising horror directors today including Ari Aster and Jordan Peele make their mark on film with their own style of scare tactics.

Related: 25 Classic Film Mockumentaries Gallery: From ‘Spinal Tap’, ‘Best In Show’, ‘District 9’ To ‘Punishment Park’ & More

Some horror films are even considered to be the most iconic movies in cinematic history such as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1955 arthouse thriller Diabolique, Charles Laughton’s psychological terror The Night of the Hunter, Brian De Palmas’ 1976 Carrie and Tobe Hooper’s slasher classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

We’ve chronicled our picks for Deadlines’ top 50 classic Halloween...

This Is Spinal Tap is one of the most quotable films in cinema history and defined the genre of film known today as the mockumentary.

Rob Reiner’s 1984 directorial debut about an aging English metal band chronicled fame, groupies and their fateful tour and would set the bar for the style of film to satirize a subject depicting fictional events but presented as a documentary. They often use the conventions of traditional documentaries, such as interviews and narration, to tell a fictional or exaggerated story.

Christopher Guest, who portrayed Nigel Tufnel in This Is Spinal Tap, would go on to direct and star with an incredible ensemble cast in many of his productions that included Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge in the classic mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration and Mascots.

Jemaine Clement...

There have already been several hundred complaints to Ofcom over Gregg Wallace’s “documentary” The British Miracle Meat, which aired on Channel 4 in July, and introduced the nation to the supposed rise in lab-grown meat derived from human flesh.

This groundbreaking satire was an instant viral hit, but seemed to divide the nation between those who thought it was a genius piece of television, and those who were disturbed, disgusted, or even duped.

But this is far from the first time that British television has controversially traumatised the nation: The British Miracle Meat is merely the latest in this country’s rich tradition of using dystopian TV shows and hoaxes to permanently scar the public. Let’s take a look (if you dare) at this particularly bleak area of British TV history, most of which you’ve probably long-since wiped from your memory (sorry):

The War Game (1966)

So...

Cars have played a vital role on screen for over a century, and some have even surpassed to lead as the feature character, protagonist and villain.

Cars have evolved in design since Carl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1886 — from the legendary 1949 Mercury Cope in Rebel Without a Cause, the sophisticated 1964 Aston Martin in James Bond’s Goldfinger through to the futuristic design of the Batmobile in Batman Begins.

Successful franchises including The Fast and the Furious; Back to the Future and Transformers have all been down to the success of the motor vehicles that have played a vital role featuring as their central lead and gone on to create iconic moments in cinema.

Related: 25 Classic Film Mockumentaries Gallery: From ‘Spinal Tap’, ‘Best In Show’, ‘District 9’ To ‘Punishment Park’ & More

Notable cars that did not make the list as they were made famous in television shows include Kitt from Knight Rider,...

Film Noir is a universe based around mystery, the femme fatale, and the detective. Sex, lies and murder is the seductive tone that created the visually stimulating art form of cinema that began in the 1940s with The Maltese Falcon.

The film is considered the first real noir that starred Mary Astor and Humphrey Bogart and set off a chain of mainstream hits of films including Double Indemnity; Mildred Pierce; The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Third Man.

The Faces of Noir: Studio Portraits Featuring the Silver Screen Stars Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart & Rita Hayworth

The genre ‘Noir’ was coined by French critic Nino Frank and would define the cat-and-mouse murder mystery era of film with memorable fiendish crooks, stylish bombshells, and deadly characters who set the silver screen alight for two decades.

Films that have stood the test of time with style and substance include Alfred Hitchcock’s...

First-time directors have to start somewhere when making their first project and have to cut their teeth in film on a no-budget or micro-budget production. They take on multiple roles of producer, writer, costume designer, production and craft services to save money as there is no budget to hire professionals.

This can spark creative outcomes as the crew and their director have to focus on how to spend the budget, creating a standout indie film that can go on to rake it in at the box office and become a cult classic.

Director Robert Rodriguez’s breakthrough 1993 feature film, El Mariachi, was created on a shoestring budget of only $7,000, launching his career. It still holds the Guinness World Record for the lowest-budget film to gross $1 million at the box office.

Other first-time directors include Kevin Smith, who made Clerks on a $27,000 budget in 1994; David Lynch who created the cult classic...

The art of the documentary aims to reveal some kind of hidden truth to its audience. And this desire for being earnest makes the genre ripe for comedic material. Enter the mockumentary, an often comedic riff on the documentary, primarily through outlandish characters that are larger than life and oddly specific topics that are almost too weird to be true. If documentaries are seen as documents of truth, then mockumentaries are a mirror reflecting back at the audience, revealing just how easy it is to fabricate reality. They aren't always funny though, especially when looking at films such as "Punishment Park" and "Man Bites Dog," where the films' realities...

The post The 15 Best Mockumentaries, Ranked appeared first on /Film.

Above: Poster by Frank Stella for the 9th New York Film Festival.Compared to the 32 films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival, not to mention the seemingly hundreds of others playing in sidebars, the 1971 edition of the NYFF, half a century ago, was a lean affair. With only 18 films, down from 78 just four years earlier, the ninth edition of the NYFF was, according to its director Richard Roud, a “belt-tightening festival, a year of consolidation.” In fact, the financially strapped festival almost didn’t take place that year. A New York Times article published midway through the event mentions that “outside the 984-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, there is only one poster announcing the festival [one assumes it was the beautiful Frank Stella poster above] that is quietly and modestly taking place inside.” A far cry from the glorious phalanx of digital billboards currently beaming outside Alice Tully Hall and the Elinor Bunin Center.The...

In his latest interview, screenwriter and film podcast host Stuart Wright talks with screenwriter Gemma Hurley. She is one of the writers on the upcoming show The Rising and the co-writer of the amazing streaming horror hit Host, which took the internet by storm in 2020. Gemma talks about her choices of 5 Great Found Footage Films, which include:

Ghost Watch (1992) The Blair Witch Project (1999) Paranormal Activity (2007) Lake Mungo (2008) Creep (2014)

Notable mentions of:

Punishment Park (1971) Cannibal Holocaust (1980) The Conspiracy (2012) Be My Cat: A Film For Anne (2015) Butterfly Kisses (2018)

Check out the rest of our Host coverage right here.

Nobody director Ilya Naishuller joins Josh and Joe to talk about his favorite movies.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Nobody (2021)

Hardcore Henry (2016)

Billy Jack (1971)

My Winnipeg (2007)

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Top Gun (1986)

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Seven (1995)

Bill Hicks: Revelations (1993)

The Mission (1986)

The Killing Fields (1984)

Captivity (2007)

The Killing (1956)

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004)

Once Upon A Time In America (1984)

You And I (2008)

Infested (2002)

No Country For Old Men (2007)

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

Goodfellas (1990)

Goldfinger (1964)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

Papillon (1973)

Papillon (2017)

Midnight Run (1988)

Planet of the Apes (1968)

Oldboy (2003)

Parasite (2019)

Assassins (1995)

Ladder 49 (2004)

Waterworld (1995)

Heathers (1989)

Mad Max (1979)

A History Of Violence (2005)

The ’Burbs (1989)

Punishment Park (1971)

The War Game (1966)

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Uncut Gems (2019)

Culloden (1964)

Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Fail Safe (1964)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Let The Right One In (2008)

Patton (1970)

Hardcore (1979)

Mr. Nobody (2009)

District 9 (2009)

Paths of Glory (1957)

A Clockwork Orange...

Forget Poldark’s pecs – with his film Bait, Mark Jenkin has captured the real Cornwall, a place of struggling locals and second-homeowners in simmering conflict

Twenty years ago, Mark Jenkin returned to his boyhood home in north Cornwall to shoot his debut film, Golden Burn, about the tensions between local lads and the owner of a caravan park. Jenkin had been studying in Bournemouth, then living in London and would soon move back permanently. “What’s your Cornwall?” his character asks. “Weekend getaway, summer retreat, Cornish pasties and clotted cream, pixies? Or is it your home? Not your second home – your only home?”

While he was filming in Porthcothan, Jenkin thought up another film, this one about a Cornish civil war. It was August 1999 and thousands of visitors were driving out of the county on the A30, then a single lane, after witnessing the solar eclipse. Named in tribute to...

Stars: Ashley Bell, Pat Healy, James Landry Hébert, Michael Villar, Bob Bancroft, Larry Fessenden, Graham Skipper, Darby Stanchfield, Alan Ruck | Written and Directed by Mickey Keating

Sometimes I’m sure people think I’m just being contrary in my reviews – there are films I like that Many don’t (if you remember the first Frightfest I covered in 2009 you’ll know what I’m talking about); and there are films that are critically acclaimed, be it by other movie blogs, big name film critics, whomever, that just don’t resonate with me. One such film was Mickey Keating’s previous film Pod. However, not to be put off by one bad experience, and thanks to good word of mouth I decided to give his latest film, Carnage Park, a go…

Carnage Park sees two criminals rob a bank and go on the run. However things don’t go to plan...

The parameters, mutually agreed upon by my editor Danny Kasman and myself, are these: A bi-weekly (every two weeks) column, entitled "On Mubi / Off," covering two films—one currently available on the Mubi streaming platform in the United States, the other screening offsite (in theaters, on VOD, Blu-ray/DVD, etc). The movies may share some similarities in approach, execution and theme, or they may not. Mostly, my own interests and curiosity will dictate what films are covered and in what way, and I hope you'll find the prose, the pairings, and/or the analysis compelling enough to follow along.On MUBITerminal Island (Stephanie Rothman, 1973)Sight unseen, I thought Stephanie Rothman's 1973 exploitation cheapie Terminal Island would make for a good inaugural article lead-off—something Z-grade disreputable to complement the A-level sleaze (not necessarily a criticism) of the other movie covered in this column. (We'll get to you momentarily, Mr. Bond.

Brian Trenchard-Smith's outrageous futuristic gore-fest imagines an Australian extermination camp run by the sadistic Michael Craig and Roger Ward, where jaded rich folk come to hunt human prey. The leading targets for this week's jaunt are Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey. It is snarky? Is it subversive? An alternate title was Blood Camp Thatcher! Turkey Shoot Blu-ray Severin Films 1982 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 93 80 min. / Escape 2000, Blood Camp Thatcher / Street Date September 22, 2015 / 24.98 Starring Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey, Michael Craig, Carmen Duncan, Noel Ferrier, Lynda Stoner, Roger Ward, Michael Petrovitch, Gus Mercurio, John Ley. Cinematography John McLean Film Editor Alan Lake Original Music Brian May Special Effects John Stears Second Unit Director / Executive Producer David Hemmings Written byJon George, Neill Hicks, George Schenck, Robert Williams, David Lawrence Produced by William Fayman, Antony I. Ginnane Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Who cannot appreciate a movie that carries the alternate title Blood Camp Thatcher?...

Punishment Park

Written and directed by Peter Watkins

1971, USA

Images of the heavy-handed police response to protests of the fatal shooting of unarmed Missouri teenager Michael Brown have re-ignited discussion about the increasing militarization of U.S. police forces.

They are also reminiscent of this indelible image from Punishment Park, a powerful faux documentary that brought police militarization to its extreme but inevitable conclusion over 40 years ago.

While hardware is a large part of the Ferguson story, Punishment Park’s $95,000 budget (per the original press kit, which is included with a 2005 DVD release) perhaps precluded director Peter Watkins from equipping the cast with anything quite as threatening, but the film’s impacted is hardly blunted. The press kit insists “Punishment Park takes place tomorrow, yesterday or five years from now. It is also happening today.” And this can still be said of it.

Punishment Park is not only a prescient...

Stars: Patrick Boland, Kent Foreman, Carmen Argenziano, Luke Johnson, Katherine Quittner, Scott Turner, Stan Armsted, Mary Ellen Kleinhall | Written and Directed by Peter Watkins

“Under the provision of Title 2 of the 1950 Internal Security Act, also known as the McCarran Act, the President of the United States of America is still authorized, without further approval by Congress to determine an event of insurrection within the United States and to declare the existence of an “internal security emergency”. The President is then authorized to apprehend and detain each person as to whom there is reasonable ground to believe probably will engage in certain future acts of sabotage. Persons apprehended shall be given a hearing, without right of bail, without the necessity of evidence and shall then be confined to places of detention.”

Peter Watkins, a British filmmaker who would work for the BBC in the 1960’s before finally directing Punishment Park in...

Found footage films get a bad rap - and worse reviews. But the genre combines the vitality of punk rock with the reach of a video viral, and it has earned, if not respectability, then at least a respectful reappraisal. Some found footage (hereafter Ff) films are, admittedly, unwatchable (see The Devil Inside or, better, don't). But others, such as recent West Country-set religious chiller The Borderlands, or Bobcat Goldthwait's creepy Bigfoot hunt Willow Creek (out on May 2), are closer to unmissable.

Beyond an ominous title card, Ff films require little backstory, and the genre has only a brief history of its own. An uncompromising, hand-over-the-camera-lens look at totalitarianism in Vietnam-era America, Peter Watkins' 1971 mock-doc Punishment Park is considered Ff's chief forebear. Ruggiero Deodato's still-troubling Cannibal Holocaust (1979), however, is the most striking early archetype. Following a gonzo film crew into tribal Amazonia, it puts video-nasty atrocities through a film-school filter,...

Cinematography festival will also honour Avatar production designer Rick Carter and documentary cinematographer Joan Churchill.

Camerimage, the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography (Nov 16-23), is to hand honourary awards to John Turturro, Rick Carter and Joan Churchill.

Turturro, best known for roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the Transformers franchise, will be presented with the festival’s Special Award to Actor-Director at a ceremony in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

A regular collaborator with the Coen brothers, Turturro most recently wrote and directed comedy Fading Gigolo, which will receive its Polish premiere at the festival.

Carter, who won Oscars for his work on Lincoln and Avatar and received nominations for Forrest Gump and War Horse, will receive Camerimage’s Production Designer with Unique Visual Sensitivity Award.

The production designer and art director also boasts credits including Amistad,A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Cast Away, War of the Worlds, What Lies Beneath, Jurassic Park, and Back to the Future Part II...

A part of After Dark Films' second series of After Dark Originals, the satanic flick Ritual has just been set for a December 31st release on both DVD and digital platforms. Learn all about it here!

From the Press Release

After Dark Films proudly announces the sixth film in its After Dark Originals 2 series (ADO2), Ritual, a horrific tale that craftily brings you into the world of sadistic satanic rituals.

Ritual marks the feature film debut of director and writer Mickey Keating. It stars Lisa Marie Summerscales (Water for Elephants), Dean Cates (You, Only Better), and Derek Phillips (42, "Friday Night Lights").

"There is a stark and lonely reality to these characters that makes the film so terrifying. We are excited to add this to our line-up." - Stephanie Caleb.

"Ritual is a love letter to pulpy 1970s horror films like Race With the Devil, Punishment Park, and Hardcore. I've...

After Dark Films has revealed the one-sheet for Ritual, the latest film to join the After Dark Originals 2 series.

Ritual is a horrific tale that craftily brings you into the world of sadistic satanic rituals; it marks the first feature debut for director and writer by Mickey Keating, starring Lisa Marie Summerscales, Dean Cates, and Derek Phillips.

"Ritual is a love letter to pulpy 1970s horror films like Race With The Devil, Punishment Park, and Hardcore. I've loved the works of After Dark Films since their first Horrorfest broke onto the scene and I couldn't be more excited that my movie found a home with them," says Keating.  Head inside for a larger look at the one-sheet!

Read more...

London Spanish Film Festival

This year's festival includes a separate focus on Catalan cinema, just weeks after Catalans came out in droves to campaign for independence. Partisan or not, Spanish cinema still looks to be in decent shape. There are accessible commercial movies here – Los Pelayo is a sort of Mallorcan Ocean's Eleven; A Game Of Werewolves is a Galician horror. But there's also more pensive cinema, such as Los Pasos Dobles, a Mali-set meditation on art and memory.

Ciné Lumière, SW7, Fri to 10 Oct

Safar: A Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema, London

Call yourself a global cinema aficionado? If names like Soad Hosny or Adel Imam mean nothing to you, you're still a few regions short of all-encompassing movie omnipotence. So here's the place to quickly fill that gap. Despite the title, what we're mostly talking about here is Egyptian cinema – the biggest player in the region. Hosny, who...

Welcome to This Week in DVD! Lots of titles hitting shelves today, and we’re covering nineteen of them below. High profiles like Real Steel and Paranormal Activity 3 are releasing alongside indies like The Woman and Beware the Gonzo. There’s also several older titles worth checking out including Punishment Park, The Arena with Pam Grier and a Criterion release of Godzilla. As always, if you see something you like, click on the image to buy it. The Whistleblower A female cop (Rachel Weisz) from the Midwest takes a temporary but high paid job as a Un peacekeeper in Bosnia and discovers despicable crimes and criminals in her midst. Her instinct as a cop is to help people and bring the guilty to justice, but the systematic corruption may be too widespread and unbeatable. Weisz gives a strong and emotional performance, and the film pulls no punches in its exploration of the sex trafficking trade that...

Rating:

There is a period in American cinema history commonly referred to as the ‘New Hollywood’ era, in which filmmakers sought to undermine the prevailing conservative ideology of Nixon’s America from within the studio system itself. American directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Dennis Hopper and Robert Altman are usually linked to such films. While they remain interesting films today, their power – or perceived radicalism – is arguably diminished through the sands of time. One film from this period, which is largely unseen, has refused to allow the corrosive passing of time liquidate its message. Punishment Park was stubbornly ignored by the Hollywood studio system, was written and directed by an Oscar-winning Englishman – Peter Watkins – and is undoubtedly one of the most persuasive and revolutionary films from the Vietnam period of American history. The film is as hauntingly relevant and prescient today as it was then.

Punishment Park

When this film was released in 1971, the events that inspired it (such as the Kent State shootings and the Vietnam war) were still fresh in the audience's minds.

When it arrived on DVD a few years back, it was the incarcerations at Guantánamo Bay that drew obvious comparisons. It's only fitting that this latest release, on Blu-ray (and DVD again) arrives soon after rioting and general unrest in Egypt, London, America and, sadly, plenty of other locations. Highly influential director Peter Watkins again uses the documentary style he developed with earlier classics The War Game and Culloden to great effect. A collection of student, arty types and suspicious-looking longhairs are paraded in front of a community tribunal (more a kangaroo court) for various crimes against society (some no more than daring to question the status quo). They are told they can have their long prison sentences commuted to...

It's an annual event as well as a browse that could suck up an entire weekend: Senses of Cinema's worldwide poll of… well, they're not all critics, so let's just call them friends of cinema. You'll want to scroll up and down the whole thing, but take a look, too, at the best of 2011 according to Notebook editor Daniel Kasman and contributors Celluloid Liberation Front, Christoph Huber, Olaf Möller and Dan Sallitt as well as a major presence here in the Forum and elsewhere, David Ehrenstein.

London. This is the year we'll be seeing the results of Sight & Sound's poll of more friends of cinema regarding the greatest films of all time. It happens only once every ten years and in the magazine's pages, Graham Fuller argues a mighty case for the return of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) to the top ten. The film's opening today for an extended run at BFI Southbank,...

Punishment Park (Masters of Cinema) is to be released in the UK in a new Dual Format Blu-ray + DVD edition on 23 January 2012. We have three copies of the Blu-ray to give away.

Both controversial and relentless in its depiction of suppression and brutality, Punishment Park was heavily attacked by the mainstream press and permitted only the barest of releases in 1971. However, like Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) and Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), Peter Watkins’ film has established itself as one of the key, yet rarely seen, radical films of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Giving voice to the disaffected youth of America that had lived through the campus riots at Berkeley, the trial of the Chicago Seven and who were witnessing the escalation of the Vietnam War, Punishment Park was named by Rolling Stone as one of their top ten films of 1971 and has earned many admirers in the four decades since its release.

You’ll often hear me sing the praises of Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label and that’s for one thing: they release the best of the best in world cinema: from long forgotten gems to master work classics. On 23rd January they’ll be releasing Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park for the first time on Blu-ray. We’ve been sent [...]...

As the mighty Monsters arrives on DVD and Blu-ray, we caught up with director Gareth Edwards for a chat about filmmaking, mockumentaries and Godzilla…

One of last year's very best sci-fi movies, Monsters gained a great deal of attention, thanks to its stunning acting, direction and special effects. On a shoestring budget, filmmaker Gareth Edwards acted as writer, director and effects creator, with actors Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy largely improvising their dialogue on location in Guatemala.

The result was a low key, tender sci-fi drama, a touching journey through a near-future Central America that has become a war zone, with the Us army engaged in a perpetual war against vast, octopus-like creatures from outer space.

Monsters' critical acclaim has propelled Edwards into the movie industry's attention, and over the past few months, he's been developing a sci-fi project with Russian filmmaker, Timur Bekmambetov, and most excitingly, developing a...

Take One Action, Edinburgh & Glasgow

Want to save the world but not sure where to start? This festival should at least give you some pointers, if not rouse you into action. Its mission is to bring together audiences, film-makers and activists and to highlight pressing global issues through film. There's no shortage of material. Big issues such as global warming, hunger, the oil industry and Israel-Palestine are well covered in fiction and documentary, but it's not necessarily all bad news. There are inspirational stories, such as Persona Non Grata, about a crusader for slum justice in Venezuela, or classic doc Powaqqatsi with a live score, and even a Namibian HIV drama, in which the audience decides the ending.

Filmhouse, Edinburgh & Glasgow Film Theatre, Thu to 5 Oct; visit takeoneaction.org.uk

Branchage Film Festival, Jersey

There aren't that many cinemas on Jersey, but this festival doesn't need them anyway. When it...

In the second part of the two interviews I was invited to take part in for the promotion of The Last Exorcism, I met the film’s producer, Eli Roth. Writer, director and sometime actor, Roth is laid back (both figuratively and quite literally), sharply dressed and surprisingly handsome in person. As opposed to director Daniel Stamm’s enthusiastic joy for talking about his movie, Roth is more reserved, although clearly in his element – the filmmaker evidently knows not only how to direct a scene but also an interview. He feeds us information at his own pace, casually displays his encyclopaedic knowledge of horror and sets himself up nicely for some witty jokes. Roth was a compelling orator, as is hopefully evident below.

I was watching your Carson Daly interview this morning and in that you were saying that the reason you produced as well as directed your first couple...

Close-Up Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami Written by: Abbas Kiarostami Starring: Hosein Sabzian, Hassan Farazmand, Mehrdad Ahankhah Abbas Kiarostami's 1990 docudrama Close-Up completely buries the defining line between documentary and drama. It's a subversive piece of meta filmmaking that comments on the value of art and cinema through the trial of one overzealous man whose desire to live vicariously through the films -- and filmmaker's -- he loves drove him to deception. The opening ten minutes of Close-Up manages to lay out the entire plot of the film while still keeping the audience completely in the dark. Two dashboard mounted cameras capture a taxi ride -- in what seems to be real time -- as a journalist and two police officers arrive at the home of an upper-class family to arrest a man who's been fraudulently impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. We slowly learn that the suspect, Hosein Sabzian, had told the family he was Makhmalbaf,...

Cannes 2010 Coverage

David Cairns

The Forgotten: Trigger Happy Punks

The Forgotten: Mood Swings

The Forgotten: Seduced and Abandoned

Adrian Curry

Movie Poster of the Week: "Guns"

Movie Poster of the Week: "Tentacles"

Movie Poster of the Week: "Tropical Malady"

Movie Poster of the Week: "La religieuse"

Daniel Kasman

Image of the Day. Records of Material Objects in the Cinema #1

R.I.P. William Lubtchansky

Images of the Day. Ideal Couples

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Days 1 & 2

Cannes 2010. An Actor-Director and His Women: "Tournée" (Mathieu Amalric, France)

Cannes 2010. 3-Wall Realism: "Tuesday, After Christmas" (Radu Muntean, Romania)

Cannes 2010: Sincere Love: "The Strange Case of Angelica" (Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal)

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Day 3

Cannes 2010: A Devil without the Details: "Aurora" (Cristi Puiu, Romania)

Cannes 2010. Love-Hate Relationships: "Au petite bonheur" (Marcel L’Herbier, France, 1946)

Cannes 2010. Playful Protest: "Hands Up" (Romain Goupil, France)

Cannes 2010. Favorite Moments: Day 4

Cannes 2010. Today's Quiet City: "I Wish I Knew" (Jia Zhangke,...

Anthology Film Archives in New York City begins a three-day engagement of a new 35mm print of Peter Watkins' 1970 Punishment Park on Friday, May 14. It should be noted that the screen caps illustrating this post are not derived from that print but from the Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Region 2 U.Kdvd of the film, which has excellent image quality and was no doubt transferred from a first-rate source. I did see the new print, and it's excellent. I wouldn't call it a staggering improvement over the version on the Moc DVD. But seeing the film in a more public/social environment than your home theater does present certain experiential advantages. For one thing, you're less coddled by your home environment, and thus less likely to try and talk yourself into the notion that Punishment Park can't, as it were, happen here. Although if you've got a lick of sense...

The 7th annual Calgary Underground Film Festival is ready to start off with a bang this year on April 12 and then continue through to April 18. Opening night will see the results of the festival’s wildly popular 48-hour Movie Making Challenge, where registered teams were given a genre, a prop and a line of dialogue; then sent out to craft perfect cinematic masterpieces in just two short days.

Then, the rest of the fest is dedicated to some of the wildest films made in both the fest’s home country of Canada and from around the world, including Indonesia, Serbia, the UK and the U.S.

If you’re attending the festival, there’s one incredibly fun documentary you need to see: Michael Petersen’s Eddies: The Documentary, about the craziest beer commercial-making competition in the world — that happens to take place right in Calgary every year! Petersen profiled several...

Let me just begin with the fact that I am loving the ‘re-discovery’ of Peter Watkins‘ filmography on DVD. A good number of his films seemed to have skipped both repertory cinema and VHS (outside of rare and ratty VHS dubs) and remain only vaguely remembered, excluding of his Oscar winning The War Game, until the touring retrospective in 2005 which made stops in New York and Toronto. As Terry Gilliam seems to amass a number of failed projects via large ambitions and curiously bad karma, Watkins seems to court distribution roadblocks with the combination of innovative narrative techniques (off-putting to mainstream acceptance) and confrontational up-to-the-minute politics (off-putting to conservative distributors). To say that Watkins‘ films were ahead of their time is an understatement. A gross one. It is interesting that cinephiles are only catching up Watkins‘ work while the themes captured in his films are just as resonant and relevant today,...

• Quick Links > D.O.A.P > Newmarket Films > Toronto film festival Death of a President (D.O.A.P.), the UK TV movie that became one of the most controversial and buzzed-about films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, has been snapped up by Newmarket Films for release in the Us. The mockumentary, which spawned hundreds of headlines even before its screening (like Snakes On A Plane, or S.O.A.P, oddly enough), recreates and reexamines the assassination of current President George W. Bush by a Syrian sniper in Chicago. Newmarket, amongst whose other releases are Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4Eva, Whale Rider, and Christopher Nolan's Memento and upcoming The Prestige, is evidently not worried about the impending foot-stomping, boycotting, and loud voices that Conservative America will no doubt expound at selected theatres when this film is actually released. Gabriel Range, the director of D.O.

...