Since 1978, Halloween hasn’t just been a day to worship Satan and eat small candy bars. It’s also been a celebration of a long-running, highly influential film series about a masked killer: Batman. Just kidding. Trick-or-treat! It’s Halloween, John Carpenter’s seminal stab-fest that was subsequently ripped off by Friday the 13th, a lot of others, […]
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We doubted that Saw 3D, the seventh and “final” chapter in the gruesome franchise, would be the last one (that it was the seventh we did not dispute), and our cynicism has paid off (again). Part eight, Jigsaw — now it’s named after the villain instead of his favorite weapon — isn’t what you’d call “necessary,” […]
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Practical Magic (1998) pits the magic of women against the villainy of an abusive man while showing the power of sisterhood. The movie equates witchcraft with feminism, reflecting the historical reality that witch trials have been used to punish the behavior of transgressive women. Through the unifying connection of women-only spaces, the women of Practical Magic […]
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The Devil has been a prominent part of film since its inception, but the depiction of Lucifer has changed with the times to reflect humanity’s vices. Let’s look at how Lucifer has transitioned from the big-horned behemoth into the shifting shape of a man he is today. (In the interest of time and space, we’re […]
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Obsessive compulsive disorder is an incredibly tough mental illness to live with. While numerous movies and TV shows portray OCD as a wacky personality quirk, the reality of it is much more complex and is far removed from the cliché that our society perpetuates. Hell, all you have to do is take a look at […]
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In 2004, I was committed to a mental hospital in Cherry Hill, N.J., in the middle of the night. I couldn’t recall why. The last thing I remembered flittered through my consciousness like static between radio stations. It was the movie Darkness Falls and three of Montclair’s finest firemen standing over me with plastic tie […]
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It’s October, which for Hollywood means one thing: Time to burn off the movies that weren’t loud enough to be summer releases but are too stupid to be end-of-the-year prestige films. This weekend there are FIVE new wide releases, five very different movies that will collectively occupy about 30% of the nation’s movie screens. They […]
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I can think of quite a few projects for the state of Florida to work on if they’re taking suggestions, but the wonderfully humane, heartbreakingly kind film called The Florida Project takes an unexpected route. Writer-director Sean Baker, whose Tangerine was also a warm visit with people on the fringes of society (transgender hookers, in that case), […]
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If you’ve ever read anything about silent film, you’ve likely seen the image of an impossibly pale, kohl-eyed Theda Bara wearing little more than two gravity-defying snakes coiled around her breasts. It’s as iconic an image as Charlie Chaplin in his tramp garb when it comes to encapsulating the allure of silent film. The famous […]
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What does it mean to be a black man in America? If we believe the media, it means you’re a target or some kind of miscreant. In part because of the tone set by the current Administration, these stereotypes are promoted as truth and used as justification for the mistreatment of black men by racists, […]
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Last week was the fifth edition of Beyond Fest, Los Angeles’s most popular genre film celebration. Over the course of 11 days, the historic Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in the heart of Hollywood played host to a diverse mix of new, classic, and forgotten movies of the horror, action, sci-fi, and exploitation variety, from all around […]
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Jackie Chan plays the person that the title The Foreigner refers to, though nobody ever calls him that. They tend to call him “Chinaman,” as in, “That bloody Chinaman!” Halfway through I thought: “I bet this movie was originally called The Chinaman.” Sure enough, it’s based on a 1992 novel (by Stephen Leather) that had that […]
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