Scraps on Cinema

It's been some seventeen years since filmmaking buddies and Tennessee natives Greg Swinson and Ryan Thiessen made a movie. And if you've ever seen their preliminary debut, Five Across the Eyes , then you have a pretty good idea as to why there's been such a long downtime between projects. Shot with MiniDV cameras over nine nights in the sticks around their hometown, Five Across the Eyes  is really scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to regional exploitation. It's a grungy, vile mess miscalculated to make some sort of provocative splash rather than tell anything close to a compelling story, cynically riding on the coattails of a new millennium vogue in "torture porn" and New French Extreme while vainly aspiring to some kind of corporeal anti-art. There are plenty of trashy sub-movies like Five Across the Eyes  to go around; and like all cycles of exploitation, it would have been no surprise if it happened to be one of a million fly-by-night credits

Based on the semi-autobiographical, non-fiction book of the same name co-written by Evangelical pastor and author Greg Laurie with Ellen Vaughn, the Christian historical drama  Jesus Revolution  presents a liberally condensed account of the emergence of the "Jesus Movement," a non-exclusive wave of Christian revivals in the late-'60s and early-'70s that was primarily born from the ashes of disillusionment, and the embers of hope, carried by young people who had either lived through or vicariously experienced the rise of the hippie counterculture, and then its dispiriting descent into waywardness, substance abuse, and communal fracture. Some came to experience grace on their own terms, while others converted on the long and winding road to what remained of San Francisco's hippie sanctuary. But to agnostic burnouts and crewcut suburbanites alike, they were all "Jesus freaks," still identifying with the Summer of Love's emancipatory idealism, but now se

Philip Marlowe may be one of the most famous P.I.'s in all the detective canon, but in his 84-years of official existence in paperback, on film, and on the radio, the figment of his character tends to elude all but name. Technically created by Raymond Chandler in his breakthrough 1939 novel  The Big Sleep , Marlowe was himself cannibalized from several tough, wise-cracking, but deceptively philosophical anti-heroes who had appeared under various  noms de plume  in the author's short stories. And if Chandler had pinned down the essence of a character, he had never been particularly concerned with the question of his age, or the continuity of his adventures. Therefore, if Philip Marlowe was a world-weary but youthful 33 in The Big Sleep  (set in 1936), and only 42 in The Long Goodbye (taking place some 14 to 16 years later), we shouldn't scratch our heads too much if the new film Marlowe  takes place in 1939, but now casts the 70-year-old Liam Neeson as a significantly older

I first became aware of Robbie Banfitch's shoestring "found footage" horror film The Outwaters  last October when I saw that it was being lined up for a screening at the Lambertville Halloween Film Festival (LHFF). I wasn't able to make it to that screening, but my regional loyalty to a Jersey boy independent and a smattering of cryptic D.I.Y. promotions ensured that the flick would stay pinned to my watchlist. Even so, I was both surprised and delighted that  The Outwaters , which turns out to be a small and rough picture indeed, should be starting out on a limited theatrical run so soon this year, its distribution being handled by Cinedigm Entertainment Group. The early months of 2023 are turning out to be a banner moment for so-called "experimental" horror films, with the Canadian film Skinamarink  seeming to dominate word-of-mouth, and Paul Owens' own LandLocked  quietly carving its own path from festival to V.O.D. Just as a jadedness and malaise see

Released theatrically in the U.K. in the summer of 2021, After Love , the dramatic feature debut of writer-director Aleem Khan, only started its limited U.S. run last week. This will mark the first stateside release for British distributor Vertigo Releasing, and they must be feeling pretty confident about the word-of-mouth chances of Khan's little movie, given that they've decided to give it the added push outside the usual metropolitan arthouses and straight to select multiplexes. It's an odd gamble to take, given that it's already been a little under three years since After Love  did the international festival rounds in 2020, and a little over two years since it swept the British Independent Film Awards for Best Screenplay, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, and Best British Independent Film. (Its star, Joanna Scanlan, also nabbed a Best Actress at the 75th BAFTA awards.) And while my own tendency is to support almost any independent and foreign film

Here's one of the more unexpected arrivals at this year's early box office: Missing , a spin-off of the 2018 mystery-thriller Searching , which starred John Cho as a single father who desperately investigates the disappearance of his teenage daughter. Though not a direct sequel, Missing  does occur within the same "universe" as the original film, kicking things off with a cold open that misdirects the audience into believing they are seeing a recreation of events from the original film, only to reveal that the protagonist is actually watching an episode of a Netflix true-crime drama based upon those events. Also, like its predecessor, Missing  is an example of a still emergent genre of "screenlife" movies, a term coined by none other than the film's producer Timur Bekmambetov. So-called "screenlife" movies can be understood as a format of immersive cinema that sprouted off from the explosion in popularity of "found footage" horror fil