Christopher Machell
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Criterion Review: The Emigrants / The New Land
★★★★★ “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” These lines from Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus, inscribed into the pedestal of the…
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Film Review: The Greasy Strangler
★★★★☆ In The Greasy Strangler, disturbed darling of Sundance, director Jim Hosking and writing partner Toby Harvard have gifted us with the year’s weirdest film. Equal parts The Human Centipede, Napoleon Dynamite and the surreal output of children’s network Nickelodeon, The Greasy Strangler‘s closest bedfellow is probably the comedy of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.…
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Criterion Review: Cat People
★★★★★ Hollywood producer Val Lewton was known for taking B-grade movie concepts handed to him by studio executives and elevating them to become more than the sum of their parts. Being both a taut psychological melodrama and highly effective chiller, Cat People is arguably Lewton’s best known and most lauded film. Its masterstroke lies in…
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DVD Review: Slugs
★★★☆☆ While Juan Piqeur Simón’s 1988 infestation horror Slugs can hardly stand up to the broad appeal of the similarly-themed Arachnophobia, Critters or Tremors, its doubling down on the splatter factor ensures the film’s place in the pantheon of B-grade creature features. With a barely-functional script that recycles virtually every cliche in the book, Slugs…
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Criterion Review: The Samurai Trilogy
★★★★★ Sadly overlooked by western audiences, Hiroshi Inagaki’s superlative Samurai Trilogy is the definitive on screen depiction of legendary 17th-century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. 1954’s Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto begins with Takezo (Toshiro Mifune) losing the battle of Sekigahara with his friend Matahachi (Rentarô Mikuni) and on the run as a fugitive. Both men are brash…
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Criterion Review: The In-Laws
★★★★☆ Alan Arkin and Peter Falk send up their dramatic personae to great effect in Arthur Hiller’s 1979 The In-Laws, a wonderfully balanced and often hilarious comedy that benefits from the formidable talents of its leads. Sheldon Kornpett (Arkin) is a successful dentist excited about his daughter’s impending wedding. Little does he know that the…
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Film Review: Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
★★★★★ The premise of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 unassailable Cold War satire, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, is deceptively simple: Russia and the US, deadlocked in the threat of mutually-assured- destruction, are a hair’s breadth away from obliterating each other in a nuclear holocaust. What could possibly go…
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Criterion Review: Burroughs
★★★★☆ Along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs was one of the most important and influential writers of the so-called Beat Generation, best known perhaps for his novel Naked Lunch. As with so many of his contemporaries, Burroughs life was defined by chaos, intense creativity, narcotic binges and personal tragedy. Filmed over…
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Criterion Review: Gilda
★★★★★ ‘There never was a woman like Gilda‘, proclaimed the poster for Charles Vidor’s classic 1946 film noir, and indeed, the mark that Rita Hayworth’s character left on cinema is indelible. The woman who once sent the inmates of Shawshank State Penitentiary wild with desire has undeniable erotic appeal, but her definition as the archetypal…
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Criterion Review: Here Comes Mr. Jordan
★★★☆☆ Adapted from the stage play, Heaven Can Wait, Alexander Hall’s 1941 Here Comes Mr. Jordan is notable mainly for its numerous remakes and its position as arguably the first supernatural comedy. Following his untimely demise, boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) is taken to heaven only to meet the eponymous angel Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains),…