Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s quirky thriller made its debut at the 2024 South by Southwest film festival where it scooped up enough fans to qualify as a cult item. Though the film has elements of “torture porn,” there’s also a Hitchcockian twist to the plot: a man held captive in a basement has just…

Director Takashi Miike brings his take-no-prisoners style to this hard-nosed Yakuza film released in 1999. Miike plays by the genre rules (almost) most of the time, keeping purists happy, but his natural inclinations for the provocative gesture thankfully take over, making way for one of the great gonzo finales of all time… right up there…

The fifth and final film in Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” series is memorable for early career appearances by Liam Neeson and Jim Carrey. Directed by Buddy Van Horn whose remarkably long and action-packed career as a stunt man (beginning in 1951 with the Byron Haskin western Warpath) was sidetracked by three directorial jobs for Eastwood, including…

David Cronenberg’s dark-souled psychological horror film casts Jeremy Irons as Elliot and Beverly Mantle, identical twin gynecologists who make a habit of seducing their patients. Unbeknownst to these women, the twins assume each other’s identity in the bedroom as well. The sibling’s sadistic roleplaying, exacerbated by drugs and paranoia, sends their lives (and the movie)…

Screenwriter Jeff Boam’s adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novel is one of the best: a multi-layered psychic/political thriller with an end-of-the-world subplot. King’s crowd-pleasing theatrics help leaven the director’s clinical approach, resulting in one of Cronenberg’s most accessible (and financially successful) films. Christopher Walken is the doomstruck psychic who can foretell the future, supported by…

Robert F. Lyons plays a bored law student turned drug dealer in Paul Williams’s 1972 drama. Based on a pseudonymous novel by Michael Crichton and his brother Douglas, the film co-stars Barbara Hershey, and John Lithgow—in his film debut—as a sleazy theater director. Charles Durning and Paul Sorvino round out the colorful cast.

Set in a New Jersey bowling alley but filmed in West Germany, Peter Lilienthal’s film stars Joe Pesci as a nightclub owner looking to score in Vegas. Two of our favorite mobsters co-star as roadblocks to Pesci’s success, The Godfather‘s Richard S. Castellano, and Frank Vincent, so memorable in both Goodfellas and The Sopranos.

Thanks to gossip columnists, movie goers needed just one look at the title to know who starred in Death of a Scoundrel. George Sanders’s scandalous reputation was perfect fodder for this cheeky melodrama about a murdered gigolo and his long line of jilted lovers, and it’s helped by a beautiful line up of suspects including…

The 2008 “re-imagining” of Paul Bartel’s tacky but wacky original lost all the subversive wit and cartoonish outrageousness that made the property a drive-in cult classic in the first place. He’s not in the trailer, but The Real Don Steele steals it as a crazed sportscaster.

Robin Williams plays a kid’s show host out for revenge in Danny DeVito’s sinister black comedy. Smoochy the Rhino is the object of Williams’ wrath, a hapless comic played by Edward Norton. The 2002 film co-stars Catherine Keener as the hard-nosed exec who ends up smooching Smoochy and Jon Stewart is on board as a…

Although Charles Bronson had been making movies for nearly 25 years and was quite popular in Europe, this international smash hit made him a superstar for the rest of his career. Michael Winner’s provocative saga of a grieving father’s vigilante vengeance became a Nixon-era touchstone that engendered four increasingly exploitative sequels over the next two…

Well, they can’t all be blockbusters. Allan Arkush chronicles his efforts to rescue the troubled futuristic follow up to Death Race 2000 from movie oblivion. Which is pretty much where it ended up anyway.

Nine 14th-century scatological stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron form the basis of the first entry in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life”, followed by The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. Trailers from Hell welcomes filmmaker Bernard Rose to its guru ranks with his thoughts about this typically eye catching Alberto Grimaldi production, complete with Morricone score.

Laurence Fishburne is an undercover cop and Jeff Goldblum is his unsuspecting partner in this 1992 crime thriller directed by Bill Duke. Set in a paranoid underworld of addicts and drug runners,  Michael Tolkin and Henry Bean deliver a densely plotted screenplay with enough twists and turns for three movies (which is the number of…

The swinging sixties came to a bleakly comic end with Jerzy Skolimowski’s undeservedly obscure 1970 British-German coproduction, a strikingly original study of obsession that descends into disturbing psycho-drama. John Moulder-Brown plays a repressed, near-infantile teenage bathhouse attendant who nurses a bizarre fixation with his enigmatic co-worker. No surprise really, considering that co-worker is played by…

Music teacher David Hemmings investigates a series of brutal axe murders in Dario Argento’s seminal giallo. Stylishly shot in Argento’s favorite location, Torino, Italy. The film exists in multiple edits, the original Italian running 126 minutes. The rock group Goblin provided their first of several Argento music scores when called in to replace composer Giorgio…

Music teacher David Hemmings investigates a series of brutal axe murders in Dario Argento’s seminal giallo. Stylishly shot in Argento’s favorite location, Torino, Italy. The film exists in multiple edits, the original Italian running 126 minutes. The rock group Goblin provided their first of several Argento music scores when called in to replace composer Giorgio…

Treat Williams plays a sea captain surrounded by mercenaries and carnivorous monsters in Stephen Sommers’ Alien on the High Seas horror film from 1998. Famke Janssen is Williams’ reluctant partner and the busy duo hop from speedboat to luxury liner in their attempts to outrun the aggressively nasty tentacled creatures.

Albert Brooks’ 1991 dramedy finds Brooks himself as a recently deceased ad executive caught in an otherworldly limbo where he must, literally, defend his life to a heavenly court in order to determine his fate in the afterlife. With Meryl Streep as Brooks’ celestial sweetheart and the great Rip Torn as his less than angelic…

Stanley Kramer’s once controversial saga of two chain gang escapees on the run seems in retrospect pretty gutsy for its era. This trailer, like the feature itself, has no musical score.

A comedy-drama about the fraught relationship between a homeless man and the paparazzi who inadvertently turns him into a Hollywood star. Written and directed by Tom DiCillo, the odd couple relationship takes an unexpectedly poignant turn thanks to the performances of  Steve Buscemi as the photographer and Michael Pitt as the rising star. Alison Lohman…

James Dickey’s acclaimed Southern gothic novel becomes a landmark experience in suspense with John Boorman’s resonant, disturbing picturization of a river rafting trip that ends in horror and disaster. As desolate a slice of Americana as has ever been put onscreen.

Though relegated to the sidelines for much of her time at A.I.P., Luana Anders could at least point to her starring role in Francis Ford Coppola’s first legitimate feature, Dementia 13. It was after hearing his pitch about a mysterious psycho killer that producer Roger Corman gave Coppola the funds to proceed—and though an unhappy…

Less pompously reverent than its predecessor (the history-making first CinemaScope production The Robe), Delmer Daves’ expansive sequel is an action-packed gladiator spectacle, anticipating DeMille’s upcoming Ten Commandments as well as years of Euro sword-and-sandal offshoots.

Directed by TFH Guru Ernest Dickerson, Demon Knight is a story of good and evil and some fabulously gory special effects. William Sadler plays the guardian of a key with the power to unlock the forces of darkness and Billy Zane is the “Collector”, a big-league demon ready to ride his zombie army into battle….

French director Olivier Assayas, usually more disposed to lyrically ambiguous meditations like The Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, lets it all hang out in this movie mind game embracing high tech conspiracies and torture porn. Connie Nielsen, Chloë Sevigny and the always game Gina Gershon star as duplicitous jet-setters in a paranoid world of…