'Sleepness Night': French gangsters in a nightclub, moving fast:
Kinetic, wild action is the thing in Sleepless Night, which recently played to a very receptive audience at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Bio: Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for The Comics Journal, L magazine, The New York Press and Slant Magazine. You can find a lot of his writing here.
Sleepless Night, a hard-boiled Gallic action film, is similar to last year's Point Blank and 2006's Tell No One in that all three are French, all lean heavily on convoluted plot twists and reversals, and all favor frenzied action over considered choreography.
Kinetic, wild action is the thing in Sleepless Night, which recently played to a very receptive audience at the Tribeca Film Festival. More
Posted on May 13th, 2012 6:39am
Haynes's stunning adaptation originally aired on HBO in late March and mid-April of last year. It clocks in at a little less than six hours long. The Museum's screening is part of their "Fashion in Film Festival: If Looks Could Kill" series. But this isn't the first time they've screened all of Haynes's adaptation on a big screen. (They previewed the mini-series last year before it aired on HBO.) More
Posted on May 12th, 2012 7:11am
In The Avengers, a film whose full title is tellingly Marvel's The Avengers, geek-idol Joss Whedon has delivered a fitting climax to Marvel Studios' recent series of superhero adaptations. More
Posted on May 2nd, 2012 4:55pm
Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? was distributed by American International Pictures (AIP), a company that is responsible for releasing such schlocky Roger Corman productions as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death, and which made its money primarily off of grindhouse and drive-in audiences. The crossover between the films we now associate with AIP and the films we now associate with Allen is nonexistent. More
Posted on April 27th, 2012 2:07pm
The Pirates! Band of Misfits proves that you don’t have to behave like an adult to learn how to grow up.
It's the latest import from Aardman Studios, the British company that produces the “Wallace and Gromit” claymation cartoons. Co-directors Jeff Newitt and Peter Lord and screenwriter Gideon Defoe trust their audience to understand their film's implicit individualistic message. The movie they made is not just consistently funny, but is also mature enough to not throw its maturity in its viewers' faces. More
Posted on April 26th, 2012 4:51pm
Mary Harron, the director of the 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho, is known in some circles as a horror film maker, even though this isn’t quite accurate. Harron (The Notorious Bettie Page, I Shot Andy Warhol) chooses her projects carefully, and American Psycho isn’t really a horror film anyway. More
Posted on April 22nd, 2012 8:45pm
Last week, Joe Eszterhas publicly condemned actor/director Mel Gibson in a scathing rant which unsurprisingly accuses Mad Mel of being antisemitic. Gibson and Eszterhas were supposed to collaborate on a film about famous Jewish leader Judah Maccabee. But according to Eszterhas, Gibson was impossible to work with. Eszterhas has since backed up his claims with audio of Gibson demanding to see his script and cursing out his own ex-wife. More
Posted on April 21st, 2012 7:59pm
It’s frustrating to see a naturally charming actor get stuck with subpar material. Danny Trejo (Machete, Predators) is a character actor turned action star. Having appeared in more than 200 movies since the ‘90s, Trejo’s got what has become an increasingly precious commodity: screen presence. When Trejo cold-cocks a guy, you immediately want to see him do it again. More
Posted on April 12th, 2012 10:16pm
You can tell a lot about Morgan Spurlock’s take on the San Diego Comic Convention in Comic-Con Episode IV: A New Hope based on the way he tiptoes around the issue of just how marginalized comic books have become at the festival in recent years.
Conventional wisdom has it that more and more people attend Comic Con, which will celebrate its 52nd year anniversary later this year, for everything but comic books. Instead, people go to see the pilot episodes of shows like "The Walking Dead" and "Caprica" and clips and trailers from upcoming movies from people like Francis Ford Coppola and Eli Roth. More
Posted on April 6th, 2012 3:25pm
This weekend, Williamsburg's Nitehawk Cinema will screen two very different movies, one at midnight and one at noon. Both films concern questions of memory and nostalgia.
The two films in question are Dario Argento's Deep Red and John Hughes' Sixteen Candles, both of which are about the way we remove vital information from our memories in order to make the present more palatable. More
Posted on April 6th, 2012 10:55am
