NYFF Review #6: Another Year

I'm convinced. Actually, I've long been convinced. There is not a better filmmaker walking the earth right now than Mike Leigh.

Why else do movies, or any other art form, exist but to make the viewer feel something? So if you want to see movies that make you emote joy or discomfort or anger followed by joy again, then see a Mike Leigh movie. I defy any attentive person to witness Life is

Film #93: Vera Drake

I’ve been a fan of the UK’s Mike Leigh ever since he delivered an incisive look at a working class love affair with High Hopes, back in the late 1980s. (I would consider that film his US breakthrough, even though he’d been making films in Britain since 1971’s Bleak Moments.) His is a unique voice on the world film scene, since he has almost exclusively focused his camera on Britain’s

Film #20: Repulsion

(The above poster design is an astounding unofficial graphic for Repulsion created by +Pemo+ who, at the time of its making, was a student at FADU-UBA in Buenos Aries. Check out more of his amazing collages: go to www.flickr.com and search for +Pemo+. And click on the above image for a clearer view of its perfect copy.)If I were powerful enough to go poof! and instantly make one movie on this

Film #16: Tales From The Crypt (1972)

Most people know Tales From The Crypt as an 80s/90s cable TV show in the Twilight Zone / Creepshow vein -- sometimes scary, very jokey, with an animatronic near-skeleton as its host. Those more familiar with this version of the classic, famously-banned 1950s EC horror comics probably aren't even aware that it was previously filmed, ever so slightly more earnestly than maybe was needed, in 1972.

Film #8: The Innocents

In 1961, British director Jack Clayton delivered one of the greatest horror movies ever made--the ghost story to best all ghost stories. His exquisite adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is boldly frightening, sexually suggestive, and beautifully shot (by Freddie Francis). Deborah Kerr, in perhaps her finest performance, plays a repressed nanny whose new charge--taking care of two

Film #5: The Conqueror Worm a.k.a. Witchfinder General

One of the horror genre’s most criminally overlooked classics is 1968’s The Conqueror Worm. Known in the U.K. as Witchfinder General, this extraordinarily downbeat tale stars Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins, the real-life henchman for Cromwell in wartorn 17th century England who was assigned to find and prosecute witches hidden within the country’s tiny townships. He’s an intriguing character