Images courtesy Universal Pictures   Ryan Gosling is back behind the wheel in the latest '80s relaunch, The Fall Guy. The update of the classic Lee Majors series brings the show into the present with stuntman Colt Seavers fighting would be bad guys, doing his damnedest to survive a series of death defying car crashes, boat sequences, and daring jumps with one swooning Emily Blunt playing his significant love interest with a heart of gold. The film skips over the bounty hunting premise of the original and trades it for a more action-centric focus that lets Gosling continue to play ..read more

  Images Courtesy of A24 Pure viciousness. Jeremy Saulnier's third film, Green Room, is a tense standoff piece that is wound so tightly it threatens to come undone under its own exhausting framework, but manages to persevere. Saulnier's vicious command, an amazing ensemble cast, and brutal imagery come together to create an unforgettable foray into the nasty underbelly of white supremacists. A punk band desperate for cash plays a gig at a Neo-Nazi hangout. In the back, they witness a criminal act and are trapped in the eponymous room, desperate to escape before the nazi’s decide ..read more

Images courtesy of MVD Rewind Collection Before moving on to direct Hallmark TV movies and straight-to-video monster movies, Hungarian born director Tibor Takács carved out his niche as a low budget purveyor of action and/or horror.  Known mostly for his Vestron horror hit The Gate with Stephen Dorff and its sequel film Gate 2: The Trespassers, the jack-of-all-trades low-budget director spoken of the same breath as Albert Pyun or Nico Mastorakis eventually worked his way up to the Disney TV movie Sabrina the Teenage Witch but not before cranking out this straight-to-video act ..read more

Images courtesy of Cult Epics Love him or loathe him, the Italian provocateur Tinto Brass while mostly being known for being affiliated with the infamous Caligula and Salon Kitty carved out his own niche as a kind of modern-day cross between Russ Meyer, Walerian Borowczyk or Larry Clark with the life affirming bawdiness of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini.  While most of his films press the camera as close to the back of a woman’s bare ass or her breasts or her crotch as humanly possible, plain as day scopophilia with his camera, his films tend to depict strong willed ..read more

Images courtesy of Arrow Video It goes without saying Sidney Lumet is one of the greatest American auteurs of his time since Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer or Norman Jewison in terms of crafting broadly appealing contemporary dramas made with technical precision and a unique all-encompassing gift for directing his actors.  The man behind such legendary screen epics as 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Serpico was nominated five times for the Academy Award during his lifetime.  Receiving an honorary Oscar in 2004, the man was a skillful technical craftsman to l ..read more

Images courtesy of 88 Films 88 Films as a British boutique label just making its landing in the United States through MVD Entertainment Group continues to unearth and license through Fortune Star an ongoing number of Chinese (distinctly Hong Kong based) action thrillers throughout the 1970s and 80s that remain overlooked if not completely unknown outside of their country of origin.  Their latest endeavor comes in the form of Golden Harvest producer-director Johnny Mak’s grim, nihilistic true-crime action saga on both sides of the fence The Long Arm of the Law.    ..read more

Images courtesy of MVD Rewind Collection From the moment George Lucas’ Star Wars or Episode 4: A New Hope began sweeping the global film marketplace as a bona fide original seismic blockbuster, variety shows and television programs including the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special did what they could to capitalize on the then-budding pop cultural phenomenon.  While Star Wars and its sequel films generated more than a few knockoffs like Starcrash and parody satires making fun of the film in a playful manner, eventually leading towards such fare as Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs, the ve ..read more

  All Images Courtesy: Eureka Video/Fortune Star The 1990s were a wild time for superhero movies. Every studio seemed to want the next Batman, but nobody seemed quite sure what that actually meant, or how to replicate the success of Tim Burton's classic. X-Men and Spider-Man had not yet teamed up to standardize the genre conventions and narrative template of the superhero movie as we now know it, and it was a decade defined by sometimes-strange experimentation with different ideas of what a superhero movie could and should be. We got the kid-f ..read more

Images courtesy of Kino Lorber Following his 1979 Soviet science-fiction fairytale fable Stalker for Mosfilm, Andrei Tarkovsky took a trip to Italy where he met up with his Italian screenwriter friend Tonino Guerra to begin work on a film they called Voyage to Italy, chronicling the Russian director’s time spent away from home making a movie in a language outside of his own.  However, given there was already a Roberto Rossellini film from 1954 dubbed Journey to Italy, the film was then retitled Nostalghia while a documentary film of preproduction on the film called Voyage in ..read more

  Images courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome Singapore Sling (1990) is the film equivalent of a leather harness worn underneath a frilly party dress. On the outside, with its beautiful and opulent cinematography and sumptuous mansion setting, it feels like a stuffy arthouse piece. Once you lift the skirt, however, you see that the dress owner isn't wearing any underwear, and the last thing you remember is her high-heeled shoe upon your neck. The film sets the stage with its moody black-and-white noir photography and a chilling, stormy evening. The scene is set with a Mother (Michele Va ..read more