End-0f-the-world movies? Yes, there is one I long to view after seeing images from it and reading about it for years, even though no one has made any claims of it being a great film.  DELUGE from 1933. 

I’m a habitual listmaker and one list I am always revising is the short list of films I long to see. Occasionally titles fall off the list as they become available on DVD, Blu-Ray or via streaming but so many continue to remain elusive on the domestic front. Netflix certainly offers some welcome options not [...]

Next to William Shakespeare, Sophocles is probably the most enduring and internationally renowned dramatist in terms of his work still being adapted for the stage, television and cinema….and I doubt you will find a more bizarre or outre version of his Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex than FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES. Directed by Japanese avant-garde filmmaker [...]

Retitled and released as Outback in the U.S. and Great Britain in 1971, Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT was barely noticed by American critics and moviegoers and quickly vanished from screens. What attention it did receive in England at the time was mostly critical of the film’s negative depiction of the Australian Outback region and [...]

You wouldn’t think there would be a connection between these two people but they were linked forever in 1953 over the film adaptation of Rachel L. Carson’s award winning book, The Sea Around Us. Carson was a respected marine biologist and an unusually eloquent nature writer whose first book, Under the Sea Wind, received critical [...]

Films about housewives losing their identity in a marriage or slowly going bonkers from the daily rituals of domesticity are plentiful enough to form their own distinctive subgenre. Among the most intriguing of these films, all of which reflect the specific time and cultural moment in which they were made, are Frank Perry’s Diary of [...]

How many times have you been browsing in a video rental store or shopping for DVDs on-line and completely rejected a potential movie rental or sale based on the box art design?

Somewhere between William Castle’s rebirth in the late fifties as the genius movie marketeer of such gimmicks as Emergo (House on Haunted Hill), Percepto (The Tingler), Illusion-o (13 Ghosts) or death by fright insurance policies (Macabre) and his prolific stint as a B-unit director in the forties and early fifties for Harry Cohn at Columbia [...]

You might not know the name but you have probably heard his music and the unmistakable sound of his harmonica on countless Italian film scores. The plaintive wail of his instrument on ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) was used as a musical motif for Charles Bronson’s avenging angel, who was identified simply [...]