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Everyone knows Woody Allen. At least, everyone thinks they know Woody Allen. His plumage is easily identifiable: horn-rimmed glasses, baggy suit, wispy hair, kvetching demeanor, ironic sense of humor, acute fear of death. As is his habitat: New York City, though recently he has flown as far afield as London, Barcelona, and Paris. His likes are well known: Bergman, Dostoevsky, New Orleans jazz. So too his dislikes: spiders, cars, nature, Wagner records, the entire city of Los Angeles. Whether or not these traits represent the true Allen, who’s to say? It is impossible to tell, with Allen, where cinema ends and life begins, an obfuscation he readily encourages. In the late nineteen-seventies, disillusioned with the comedic success he’d found making such films as Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977), he turned for darker territory with Stardust Memories (1980), a film in which, none too surprisingly, he plays a...

I used to work at a store where some of us employees liked to dress up for Halloween. One year the young woman I worked with that day dressed in her full Goth regalia (this is someone with a spiderweb tattoo), and when one customer said to her, "I love your costume," she replied, coldly and seriously, "It's not a costume." Ever since then I have thought of Halloween as the one day each year when Goths "fit in."

From whence does "Goth" come as a description of this subculture? Not from the original Goths, Germanic barbarians who sacked Rome and later founded the kingdom that eventually became Spain and Portugal. Rather, it comes from "Gothic fiction," an English literary movement (so called in reference to the architecture of castles) that dates from Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.

Such famed literature as Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,...

Brigitte Bardot turns 80 today and, as Agnès Poirier noted recently in the Observer, she's "never ceased to be a controversial figure…. In 1957, age 23, she made cinematic history in And God Created Woman [Et Dieu... créa la femme], her husband Roger Vadim's seminal film" and "when the film was released in America, it provoked outrage on a continental scale…. 'Ban Bardot!' advocated the morality leagues as if she were some kind of illegal drug." We revisit Vanity Fair's 2012 profile and Kim Morgan's appreciation of Vadim's Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme... (1973). » - David Hudson...

Brigitte Bardot turns 80 today and, as Agnès Poirier noted recently in the Observer, she's "never ceased to be a controversial figure…. In 1957, age 23, she made cinematic history in And God Created Woman [Et Dieu... créa la femme], her husband Roger Vadim's seminal film" and "when the film was released in America, it provoked outrage on a continental scale…. 'Ban Bardot!' advocated the morality leagues as if she were some kind of illegal drug." We revisit Vanity Fair's 2012 profile and Kim Morgan's appreciation of Vadim's Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme... (1973). » - David Hudson...

What a great start to the year. We’ve got hot stars, big hit TV shows, an indie horror flick that you really must see, an Oscar winner, and two from a legend. Pick your favorites to start 2014. Here’s how I’d rank ‘em…

We Are What We Are

Photo credit: eOne

“We Are What We Are”

Jim Mickle’s Sundance hit is a dark, twisted gem, a film that plays more like a Gothic thriller than a modern horror flick. It’s a wonderful reimagining of the Mexican 2010 film that recasts the Parker clan as a family on the edge of collapse after the matriarch dies in a storm. Struggling to keep their family together, they face the inevitable decay of their disgusting traditions. Mickle takes a giant leap forward with this genre hit, finding a visual sense that has propelled him to the front of the list of young horror directors.