Watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film reminded me of Franz Kafka’s story “Before the Law,” which appears in The Trial. A man travels to the door of the Law and asks for admittance, but a guard bars his way. After years of fruitless waiting, hoping and scheming outside the door, the man, on the brink of death, asks the guard why he’s never seen anyone else — doesn’t everyone seek the Law?... Read more

A quarter of a billion dollars was spent making this movie. A pie chart depicting the allocation of all those millions would have a fat slice labeled “publicity” and a much fatter one labeled “special effects.” The slice for “story and character development,” on the other hand, would be so skinny it wouldn’t have room for a label.... Read more

Richard Matheson’s story “Button, Button” takes five minutes to read and has the cruel efficiency of a fable that sticks with you for a lifetime. Writer-director Richard Kelly’s adaptation, The Box, takes nearly two hours to watch. But by the end, all you’re likely to remember are a few scenes that have the non-sequitur quality of a dream.... Read more

Suspenseful, glitzy, cutthroat, self-serving — awards season is many things. One thing it rarely is, however, is educational. This year is different. Aspiring filmmakers couldn’t ask for a more instructive lesson in the wrong and right ways to approach a biopic than the examples offered by Amelia and Coco Before Chanel.... Read more

10/30/09: The 2nd Annual Vermont Horror Fest frightened a sold out crowd Friday at the Outer Space Cafe.

Two local directors, Mike Turner and Owen Mulligan and a recent Hollywood transplant, Rob Schmidt, entertained the crowd with their terrifying films.... Read more

Scientific studies have told us two things about optimists. First, they’re more apt to delude themselves than pessimists. Second, they’re also more likely to succeed.... Read more

Many reviewers appear confused or at least forgetful in their attempt to place this documentary in its proper historical context. The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt is typical of the memory challenged, writing that This Is It “can be called the first concert rehearsal movie ever.” Um, Kirk, maybe you’ve heard of a little film called Let It Be?... Read more

Seen enough Saw sequels? For horror fans, this Halloween weekend offers some alternatives to the standard big-screen fear-mongering. On Thursday, the Firehouse Center For the Visual Arts kicks off a weekly series of David Cronenberg screenings with Videodrome, the 1983 conceptual chiller that gave cinema the indelible image of James Woods popping a VHS tape into his abdomen ... and playing it.... Read more

About halfway through Paranormal Activity, a twentysomething guy (Micah Sloat) who’s investigating weird happenings that scare his live-in girlfriend (Katie Featherston), decides to ask the possible supernatural culprit why it’s being so coy. “Hey,” he yells, “we haven’t had anything interesting happen for a while!”... Read more

I remember once reading an article about a technique with which author William Burroughs experimented: He’d scissor a manuscript or magazine story into strips, toss them in the air and piece together a new work reflecting the random pattern in which the scraps had landed. Something tells me that Guillermo Arriaga read that article, too.... Read more