A BOY AND HIS DOG

 
2024 A.D. The world (or at least America) has become a wasteland of radioactive dust. Men fight for the most precious resources: food, water and women. And dogs have developed telepathic abilities. Welcome to the bizarre post-apocalyptic world of A Boy and His Dog.

HOLY MOTORS

Holy Motors, directed by Leos Carax assaulted our screens in 2012 leaving more than a few cinemagoers scratching their heads. It is a post-modern art film that initially seems so strange as to be impenetrable, but the deeper you dig, the more surprising revelations reveal themselves. This is not a review, but a deconstruction of what I think all the craziness means. Warning: barely understood spoilers ahead.

THE SECRET OF KELLS

I love 2D animated movies. With the rise of computers, there are very few around nowadays which is a great shame. I can admire and respect the work put in to even the very worst of them to some degree (even the god awful Titanic cartoon get some kudos for actually existing). What is rarer still is that during the time of pixels, a hand-drawn feature is released that is so well done that it can topple all others and become one of my favorites in the medium. In 2010 Cartoon Saloon's The Secret of Kells did just that.

12 ANGRY MEN

12 Angry Men currently stands at number 7 on IMDB's top movies, yet if you take a glance at the comments, there are many movie goers who're baffled by this choice. The main reason seems to be that they haven't heard of it, so why has it garnered so much acclaim?

LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL

Lemora: A Child's Tales of the Supernatural, a 1973 movie directed by Richard Blackburn, is a dark fairytale of a horror film that will leave you with a great sense of unease. On the surface it's a tale of vampires, zombies, witches and werewolves but if you dig deeper it's also a tale of innocence lost, sexual awakening  and the uncomfortable transition of a young girl to womanhood

LADY IN WHITE

The Lady in White (1988), with it's themes of nostalgic youth and coming of age, plays a lost Spielberg film. It conjures up memories of the Halloween set E.T. or the Spielberg produced Goonies and Poltergeist. This spooky ghost story certainly conjures up thoughts of those 80s Amblin movies, but Lady in White holds it's own as something far more adult than it would first appear.

TIMES SQUARE

Disenfranchised youth movies became ubiquitous with the rise of punk culture and alternative music in the 70s and 80s culminating in in the slick Hollywood classics of John Hughes and the Brat Pack. Times Square, an early directorial effort from Pump Up the Volume and Empire Records' Allan Moyle, is a rougher take of the subject. And, like those later films, music plays an an important role in the plot.

7 FACES OF DR. LAO

Directed by George Pal (The Time Machine) and starring Tony Randall (The Odd Couple, Pillow Talk), The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao invited children of the mid 60s into the circus tent of our multi-faceted doctor. What unfolds is a series of morality tales instigated by the mischievous Lao and his many alter egos from mythology.

WRONG

Art cinema can be difficult to define, especially to a casual movie viewer more accustomed to Hollywood narratives. Most tend to lump in everything that isn't made on America's West coast into this category, but I feel all movies can and should be considered art. Absurdist cinema, on the other hand, take this art to a whole new level and Quentin Dupieux's 2012 movie Wrong takes the absurd to the Nth degree.

THE INNOCENTS

In 1961, director Jack Clayton ushered one of literature's finest ghost stories to the silver screen. It has often been eclipsed by the similar black and white spook-fest The Haunting released a few years later. Today, The Collection Chamber will release the greatest telling of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw - The Innocents...

THE CONGRESS

While the majority of those contained with the Collection Chamber hail from the days of yesteryear, The Congress, a 2013 movie that premiered in England during August of last to great critical acclaim, has only seen a home DVD release this past December. It is an animation/live-action hybrid by the same team that gave us the awesome animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, proving that director Ari Folman has lost none of his inventive vigour after the transition to the English language.