A Eulogy for ‘The Fast and The Furious’
Remembering the endlessly quotable film that started it all; perhaps never cool, but at least it sincerely tried....
Author : Michael Haigis
‘Spider-Man 2’ Remains A Peerless Spider-Man Film
Tobey Maguire portrays a thunderstruck Peter Parker Spider-Man 2; he staggers through the film perpetually on the edge of tears, a hero in crisis, never...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 14: ‘The Player’
When conceiving of The Filmstruck Cram, a priority was certainly to highlight the site’s role in making available the filmographies of iconic directors: Kurosawa, Hitchcock,...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 13: ‘My Winnipeg’
Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg is exactly the style of film I wouldn’t reach for if not for the ease of the Filmstruck streaming service. Easier...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 12: ‘High and Low’
In a coincidence that highlights the vitality of a service like Filmstruck, a print of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low actually screened in my city...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 11: ‘Blood Simple’
Many years before the Coen Brother’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, before No Country for Old Men, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, A Serious Man, and the...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 10: ‘The Night of The Hunter’
Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter was a critical bomb that alienated audiences when it was released in 1955, mostly because no one knew...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 9: ‘Dial M for Murder’
Dial M for Murder, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted with precision from a hit play by writer Frederick Knott, was not a film the director particularly...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 8: ‘Sisters’
Unlike other films from The Filmstruck Cram series, such as Shogun Assassin or The Long Good Friday, Brian De Palma’s Sisters is not (at the...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 7: ‘The Candidate’
The Candidate is both prescient in its portrayal of campaign politics and entirely quaint in its level of cynicism, the latter of which is calibrated...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 6: ‘The Long Good Friday’
Despite it’s well-deserved standing as one of the all-time great British films, The Long Good Friday isn’t easy to purchase on the other side of...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 5: ‘Simon of the Desert’
Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert is the kind “comedy” which provokes more introspection than laughter. It’s a riot of ideas about faith and organized...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 4: ‘Shogun Assassin’
“When cut across the neck, a sound like wailing winter winds is heard, they say. I’d always hoped to cut someone like that someday, to...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 3: ‘Branded to Kill’
1967’s Branded to Kill can be maddening. The film’s renegade director, Seijun Suzuki — who was fired by Nikkatsu in part because he turned in such...
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 2: ‘Chungking Express’
'Chungking Express' deserves to be cherished — yet by the film’s own logic, it seems just as likely to disappear while no one is looking....
The Filmstruck Cram — Day 1: ‘Horror of Dracula’
There are certain elements of Dracula, or as it was titled in America, Horror of Dracula, which probably garner ironic laughter at revival screenings. Perhaps...
Welcome to The Filmstruck Cram
Back in June of 2017, Ciara Wardlow over at Film School Rejects made a grim assessment of Netflix’s streaming library: Of the 1,350 Drama titles...
NYFF: Portraits of Rejection in ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ and ‘American Dharma’
It’s too inexact (and politically fraught) to compare Jake Hannaford, the unraveling fictional director at the center of The Other Side of the Wind, with...
NYAFF 2018: Sweetness Can’t Solve the Problem of Middle-Age in ‘Men on the Dragon’
The ostensible premise of Sunny Chan’s Men on the Dragon, the centerpiece film at the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival, is simple: four telecom...
NYAFF 2018: ‘The Blood of Wolves’ is a Gangster Throwback With Clever Twists
Ogami, one half of the odd-couple detective pairing in The Blood of Wolves, is a familiar figure. He has leathery skin, unkempt hair, and a...