Welcome back to the newest, and at times goriest, column here at Film Inquiry – Horrific Inquiry. Twice a month, I will be tackling all things horror, each month bringing two films back into the spotlight to terrify and frighten once more. And occasionally looking at those that could have pushed the envelope further. Join…
Boris Behncke was growing impatient. The sun was setting, twilight was soaking the soil, and the sky was not yet on fire. For the past few days, Mount Etna’s almost preternatural displays of liquid hot rage had come along like clockwork, spaced roughly 30 hours apart on the 16th, 18th, and 19th of February 2021….
At first glance, Pastelaria Alcôa, a bakery in the charming little town of Alcobaça, Portugal, looks thoroughly modern. Behind a gleaming glass counter are colorful, award-winning pastries that have made the pâtisserie one of the most celebrated in the country. On warm days, customers sit outside at tables shadowed by large umbrellas and enjoy the…
The media’s coverage of Covington Catholic students’ 2019 trip to D.C. may be the worst journalism scandal in recent memory. Reporters pounced on a preferred narrative, slamming the high schoolers instead of waiting for more facts to emerge. In the process they let loose the social media mob, forcing students to flee their homes and…
Screen legends Jane Fonda and Norman Lear will be receiving honorary awards at the 78th Annual Golden Globe Awards airing live at 7pm CST on Sunday, February 28th on NBC. Kerry Washington, Ted Danson, Brie Larson and Laverne Cox will pay tribute to Fonda, who is this year’s Cecil B. DeMille Award recipient, while Wanda Sykes, Marisa Tomei and Lin-Manuel Miranda will participate in the tribute package for Lear,…
What a year Mads Mikkelsen is having. The charismatic Dane is fresh from the success of Thomas Vinterberg‘s festival winning Another Round – which has rumours of Oscar noms in its future – and here he is with another Danish feature, Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice. It seems going home has served Mikkelsen very…
Standing like ancient, tortured sentries in the yard of Chatham Manor in Fredericksburg, Virginia, are two venerable Southern Catalpa trees (Catalpa bignonioides). Their gnarled branches and twisted, misshapen trunks appear to be manifestations of the horrors of war they witnessed in 1862, during the aftermath of the Battle of Fredericksburg. Read moreA Guide to The…
The Nansen Ski Jump was constructed in 1937 and was used as the location for the first United States Olympic Ski Jumping Trials. The jump is around 260 feet in length and was known as The Sleeping Giant. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonDuring its time in use, the Nansen Ski Jump was…
All of the stations on the Toei Ōedo subway line are adorned with some form of public art, from unusual sculptures to technological marvels such as the computer-designed “Web Frames” lighting at Iidabashi Station. The most fascinating of these is located in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonTitled “Fossils of the…
★ Directed by #TimStory Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonWritten by #KevinCostello Starring #ChloeGraceMoretz #MichaelPena Read moreRobert Stack Finally Solves a Mystery in ‘The Strange and Deadly Occurrence’Film Review by Hope Madden Scooby-Doo is having a moment. The franchise got its first wide release feature film last year, and the brains of…
While I was getting my film major, I saw a lot of classic movies in class, many more than once. One film I did not expect to see was a 1970 comedy about race relations, a quarter of which relied on whiteface, which held up not adequately but magnificently. Watermelon Man is about a racist…
At a height of just over 90 feet (30 meters), this beautiful waterfall flows down off the Ontika limestone cliff situated on the northern coast of Estonia between Ontika and Valaste. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonThere was once a rickety platform across the cliff, but it was eventually replaced by a…
When Thomas Sadler Roberts retired from his career as a doctor, he remained hard at work in the field of ornithology. Roberts became a professor in the discipline at the University of Minnesota. He also helped establish the Bell Museum of Natural History. Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonTen years before Roberts’s death,…
Battle wasps, to war! At least that’s the way it sounded when conservators in England recently announced that they were going to deploy an army of wasps to fight a moth infestation at a stately manor home. But alas, the reality is less an epic battle and more like a quirky rom-com (with a little…
One of the major highlights of this year’s Jewish International Film Festival program – which is set to screen in select Australian cinemas from February 17 to March 24 – is Ruthy Pribar‘s heartbreaking feature debut Asia, whose appearance at the festival arrives at the tail-end of a smash-hit critical and commercial run in 2020,…
“You won’t be able to see it until it’s about to hit.” It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine! How about some apocalyptic cinema to relax you? This short film Red Rover originally premiered in 2015, but is just now being featured online thanks to a feature from…
“The Vigil” is an exercise in horror that effectively builds its character and narrative tensions in the first half only to tighten its grip for its lean remaining minutes. Character actor on-the-rise Dave Davis stars as Yakov, a young man who lives in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. A horrible event has caused him to step…
When the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world shuddering to a halt in March 2020, it forced virtually every film set on the planet to shut down, leaving many filmmakers across the globe twiddling their thumbs. In the weeks and months that followed, directors have responded to this enforced downtime the only way they know how:…
Eight weeks into the latest season of RuPaul’s Drag Race and, just like this pandemic, it feels neverending. In this particular scenario, I don’t really think that it’s a bad thing because hey, Drag Race is life, but when the bottom two ends up being Kandy Muse, season 13’s prime source of entertainment, and Symone, the queen most…
Every decade in musical history has its influences: Chas Chandler, Malcolm McLaren, Brian Wilson, Mark Ronson. They’ve all contributed to the zeitgeist of musical evolution. Perhaps few of them – in recent history at least – can lay claim to the sheer bombast, balls-to-the-wall craziness, and never-say-die determinism of Alan McGee. The Scottish producer behind…
Inexplicable though it may seem, Mohamedou Ould Slahi spent nearly 15 years imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without being charged for a crime. Attending the wedding of a friend in his native Mauritania on the coast of North Africa only months after the fall of the Twin Towers, Slahi was approached by police officers who told…