Apart from my Letterboxd and Twitter accounts, where I post daily (even if the latter feels more and more like I'm sending my 140-character missives off into the howling void), Crooked Marquee continues to be the main outlet for my film writing. To that end, I took a deep dive into the shifting group and power dynamics in Miguel Arteta and Mike White's Beatriz at Dinner.

Next, I turned my attention to "Hollywood's Proud Tradition of Mocking White Supremacists" -- a piece that was most cathartic to write.

Lastly, I marked the tenth anniversary of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises with a close examination of it most revealing scene. And I've got two more pieces in the pipeline next month, so keep an eye out for them.

Meanwhile, for Werewolf News I covered Arrow's splendid release of 1975's Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, the less-than-impressive Skinwalkers, and the 1972 TV movie Moon of the Wolf.

...for a roundup of my writing for various websites over the past few months.

Working backwards, yesterday was a big one werewolf-wise thanks to the publication of Werewolves Versus Fascism, in which I have a short piece illustrated by my good friend K. Pease. The whole zine can cost you as little as $1 and it's for a good cause because all proceeds will benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center. I also reviewed The Werewolf Filmography: 300+ Movies by Bryan Senn. This was in lieu of my regular Full Moon Features column for Werewolf News, which so far this year has seen me tackle Neowolf, 2014's Beauty and the Beast, and the Ginger Snaps prequel and sequel.

Earlier this month, I Ran the Series of '60s Christopher Lee-starring Fu Manchu movies for The A.V. Club. This was my second Run the Series article for the site following the one I did on The Howling last summer. With luck, it won't be my last.

In the meantime, I've been steadily contributing articles to Crooked Scoreboard, starting with my appraisal of Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. My other articles for the site include Bloody Valentines: 14 Blood-Soaked and Testosterone-Fueled St. Valentine’s Day Massacres, a roundup of Zodiac Killer Movies written in tandem with the tenth anniversary of David Fincher's Zodiac, and a tenth-anniversary appreciation of Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz. And I have a major project in the hopper that will keep me up on the Scoreboard for the next month and a half.

Lastly, for Oscilloscope Laboratories' Musings, I wrote In The Loneliest Place: The Allure Of The Homme Fatale In ‘Stranger By The Lake’, which links that film to Nicholas Ray's seminal noir In a Lonely Place. As always, a pleasure to write for them.

[Note: This piece was first published by One Perfect Shot in 2015.]

Renowned British cameraman-turned-director Nicolas Roeg’s relationship with the Criterion Collection has been longstanding and fruitful for both parties. Not only did the company release two of his seminal films –- 1971’s Walkabout and 1976’s The Man Who Fell To Earth –- on laserdisc, but Walkabout was one of the very first DVDs Criterion put out in 1998, getting spine number 10. Seven years later, it was joined on DVD by The Man Who Fell To Earth and 1980’s Bad Timing, a film that would have likely languished in limbo without their intervention. Blu-ray upgrades for The Man Who Fell To Earth and Walkabout followed, with the addition of 1985’s Insignificance in 2011. That left two gaps in Roeg’s filmography, one of which Criterion filled this year by bringing back into print his 1973 masterpiece Don't Look Now, previously only available in the States on a bare-bones DVD from Paramount. (If the original director’s cut of 1983’s Eureka could be reconstructed, that would finish the job, but no one should hold their breath waiting for that to happen.)

Based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), Don't Look Now takes full advantage of the fractured editing style that had been a hallmark of Roeg’s features starting with 1970’s Performance, co-directed with Donald Cammell. In spite of its heavy use of flash-forwards, flashbacks, and seemingly unconnected inserts, though, Don't Look Now is Roeg at his most accessible. What grounds it are the performances of Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland as Laura and John Baxter, a married couple reeling from the aftershocks of the death of their daughter Christine (seen in gut-wrenching detail in the film’s bravura opening sequence) while he’s in Venice overseeing the restoration of one of its many crumbling churches. While John buries himself in his work (indeed, he was researching the very job he’s on the day Christine drowned), Laura finds comfort in the words of Heather (Hilary Mason), a blind psychic passing through Venice with her sister Wendy (Clelia Matania) that they meet by chance –- or is there such a thing in Roeg’s universe?

Scattered throughout the film, which is chock full of mirrors, reflections, visual rhymes, and recurring images of water and breaking glass, are glimpses of a figure in a red raincoat similar to the one Christine was wearing the day she drowned. Since the color scheme -– dutifully captured by cinematographer Anthony Richmond -– is otherwise severely muted, these flashes of red (usually accompanied by a synthesizer flourish from first-time composer Pino Donaggio) never fail to catch the eye, putting the viewer on the alert even if John (a born skeptic) is unaware of the danger he’s putting himself in by ignoring Heather’s warning and staying in Venice, which has been experiencing a plague of unsolved murders. This is exacerbated when the Baxters’ son has an accident at boarding school and Laura flies to England without John, yet is seen by him in the company of the two sisters later that same day. In search of answers, John turns to the police, who are as helpful as they generally are in the giallo films Don't Look Now shares some of its DNA with, leaving him vulnerable to the forces he’s been denying all along –- including his own, underdeveloped second sight.

Above and beyond everything else –- including simultaneously being a chilling horror film and a startlingly effective portrayal of the long-term effects of grief and loss –- Don't Look Now’s main claim to fame is the sequence where Roeg and editor Graeme Clifford intercut John and Laura making love with the two of them getting dressed afterward, silently contemplating the connection they’ve just made. As Steven Soderbergh notes on one of the Blu-ray’s bonus features, it’s an idea he lifted wholesale for a similar scene in his film Out Of Sight, just as many other filmmakers have nicked things from Roeg’s films over the years. What allows Don't Look Now to hold up today is that even 42 years on, it still feels as bold and original as it ever did.

Special Features:

In lieu of the commentaries that graced Walkabout and The Man Who Fell To Earth, Don't Look Now is stocked with a wide range of interviews and video pieces. These include a featurette produced for Blue Underground in 2002 where Roeg, Richmond, and Clifford talk about the development of the film, and an interview from 2006 with Donaggio, who turned to film composing full-time after his melancholy score found its way to Brian De Palma while he was looking for a replacement for the late Bernard Herrmann on Carrie. Exclusive to Criterion’s package are a new piece featuring interviews with Richmond, screenwriter Allan Scott, and Christie and Sutherland, both of whom look back fondly on the experience of making the film, a post-screening Q&A with Roeg from 2003, and the aforementioned piece in which Soderbergh and Danny Boyle talk about his influence on them. The highlight, however, is the lively conversation between Clifford and film historian Bobbie O’Steen, which is illustrated by copious clips from the film. “Nick likes brave choices,” Clifford says. “He likes things to be unusual.” Happily, there was a window of about a decade where the things he found unusual had enough of an audience that he could keep looking for them.

[Note: This piece was first published by One Perfect Shot in 2015, but since the reviews I wrote for that site disappeared into the ether not long after it was bought by Film School Rejects, I will be re-posting them here.]

For many a budding cinephile, the cornerstones of ’50s European arthouse cinema can seem forbidding, if not unapproachable. Whether they’re Italian neorealist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. and Federico Fellini’s La Strada or weighty existential dramas like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries -- all of which have been doubly canonized by their inclusion in the Criterion Collection –- some films are intimidating simply because of the decades of baggage they’re loading down with. The most daunting one of all, however, may be 1959’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, which Criterion has given a Blu-ray upgrade just in time for the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, which helped bring the Second World War to a swift conclusion.

The debut feature for director Alain Resnais, although it wasn’t originally intended to be, Hiroshima Mon Amour began life as a documentary short about the atomic bomb, which had triggered a bevy of nuclear-anxiety films –- ranging from sober nonfiction treatments to sci-fi/horror quickies –- over the previous decade. After burning through a number of potential collaborators, including fellow Left Bank documentarian Chris Marker, Resnais eventually approached novelist Margeurite Duras and proposed moving the bomb to the background of a work of fiction, making it ever-present in the characters’ lives but no longer the primary subject. She responded with an enigmatic love story between a French actress and a Japanese architect who have an affair while she’s in Hiroshima to shoot an anti-war film and pack a lifetime of passion into the scant 24 hours before her departure.

Never identified by name, the actress and architect are played by relative newcomer Emmanuelle Riva, who had primarily been a stage actress, and Eiji Okada, who had been acting in films -– including a 1953 Japanese drama simply entitled Hiroshima -– since the beginning of the decade. Making an indelible impression in her first leading role, Riva –- recently a Best Actress nominee at the Academy Awards for 2012’s Amour -– brings a haunted quality to her performance as the time she spends with her new lover gives her fleeting reminders of her first, forbidden love with a young German soldier she planned to elope with as the war in Europe drew to a close. For his part, Okada is mostly impassive, a man defined not by where he was when Little Boy was dropped on his hometown (i.e. somewhere in the Pacific fighting the Allies), but rather by where he wasn’t.

Before the audience is introduced to them as individuals, Resnais shows Riva and Okada embracing in extreme close-up, the specter of nuclear fallout conjured up by the glittery dust they’re showered with. The first 15 minutes of the film juxtaposes these images of their sweaty, groping bodies with elegant gliding shots captured by Resnais’s Japanese cinematographer, Takahashi Mikio, in a Hiroshima hospital and war museum, as well as harrowing scenes culled from vintage newsreels and the 1952 drama Children Of Hiroshima. Following Duras’s Oscar-nominated screenplay to the letter, these are overlaid with the lovers’ disembodied voices as Riva recites what she knows about the city and Okada repeatedly rebuffs her, saying, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” These sorts of echoes and repetitions recur throughout the film, even when it becomes more of a conventional narrative, albeit one with a radical sense of temporal dislocation.

The heart of Hiroshima Mon Amour is reached when Okada urges Riva to tell him about her wartime lover, which allows Resnais to provide context for the unexplained cutaways sprinkled throughout the first half of the film as Riva is bombarded with shards of her painful memories. Shot in the French city of Nevers by his frequent cinematographer, Sacha Vierny, these flashbacks take up a relatively small percentage of the film’s running time, but they include some of its most potent images and are key to understanding Riva’s character, if indeed that is even possible. As past and present, dead and living, and German and Japanese become conflated in her mind, Okada’s prediction that he’ll “think of this story as of the horror of forgetting” is answered by hers that they’ll “probably die without ever seeing each other again.” Luckily, fans of Hiroshima Mon Amour have the option of seeing it as many times as they choose.

Special Features:

First and foremost, the best feature of Criterion’s Blu-ray is its presentation of the 4K restoration done in 2013. It also carries over most –- but not all –- of the supplements from its previous DVD release, including an essay by film critic Kent Jones, interviews with Resnais and Riva recorded decades apart, and an informative commentary by film critic Peter Cowie, who places Hiroshima Mon Amour in the context of when it was made and talks about its continuing influence. New to this release are interviews with film scholar François Thomas, who discusses the film at length, and music scholar Tim Page, who talks about Resnais’s use of the music of Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue. Lastly, there’s a featurette about the challenges associated with restoring a 54-year-old film shot on two continents by two different cinematographers on two different kinds of film stock.