Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s double-bill exploitation throwback Grindhouse does not hit theaters until next week. However, Triangle audiences nostalgic for the days of B-fright features can experience homegrown horror at its most bloody and barebones this Saturday during a screening of The Forever Dead at Raleigh’s Volume 11 Tavern. The film is the brainchild […]
Neil Morris
Posted inNews
A Christmas Family Tragedy
Growing up in Winston-Salem, Matt Hodges had heard of the infamous Lawson family murders in nearby rural Stokes County where tobacco farmer Charlie Lawson shot and bludgeoned six of the seven members of his family on Christmas Day 1929. Although this calamity had been the subject of at least two books and numerous folk ballads, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Nevermore Film Fest finds artistic life amid the carnage
When is a gothic horror film festival too violent or gory? Such was the predicament facing Jim Carl and the rest of the selection committee for this year’s Nevermore Film Festival, which returns to Durham’s Carolina Theatre Friday, Feb. 23 through Sunday, Feb. 25. One goal for many specialty film festivals is to foster independent […]
Posted inGuides
10 years of Full Frame
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival‘s 10th anniversary is still two months away, but it is not too early to begin reliving its past glory. Actually, Full Frame’s Countdown to Ten series is more than a celebration; it is a micro-journey through a decade of elite documentary filmmaking, during which the genre rose out of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Oriented sexuality: Curse of the Golden Flower and The Painted Veil
For all of Zhang Yimou’s well-earned accolades, a debate simmers among many in the Chinese film elite over the proper perspective to be given the acclaimed director. Central to the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers who ascended to prominence in the 1980s, Zhang and his kinsmen rejected traditional storytelling methods for a more free […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Next year’s model?
Jump to article… Reeling in the years | This year’s model | Next year’s model? | Our year in DVDs Remember Betamax, VHS and Laserdiscs? Those home video formats are now relegated to the technological trash heap or the musty shelves of public libraries, vintage shops and outmoded home collections. History demonstrates that as technology […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Coming sooner or later
What do Nicole Kidman, Morgan Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Judy Dench, Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton, Forest Whitaker and Naomi Watts have in common? They are actors with new films that could be playing in theaters now, but Triangle audiences will not be seeing them until early next year. With much consternation, area theater owners have witnessed […]
Posted inFilm & Television
For Cynthia Hill, documentary making is about collaboration and collective enterprise
The largely erudite throng of friends and well-wishers gathered at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies pressed forward to congratulate Cynthia Hill on the forthcoming PBS broadcast of her and co-director Charlie Thompson’s film, The Guestworker, which illuminates the travails facing immigrant Hispanic farm laborers in our state. Everyone had just left a “celebration screening” […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Inconvenient births: Difficult journeys in The Nativity Story and Happy Feet
The Nativity Story Opens Friday throughout the Triangle In the post-Passion of the Christ era, it is little surprise that controversy swirls around this year’s cinematic rendering of The Nativity Story. That the hullabaloo has nothing to do with onscreen events is somewhat unexpected and, in a roundabout way, a byproduct of the turgidity of […]
Posted inNews
Shut Up & Sing
Shut Up & Sing opens at select local theaters Wednesday, Nov. 22. Once the belles of the country music ball, the Dixie Chicks are now seen by many as more akin to the Indigo Girls than the Mandrell Sisters. Shut Up & Sing reveals a defiant and unapologetic trio devoted to their craft, true supporters […]
