Take a chance on me Peter Sellers’ sans pareil performance – also his penultimate – as Chance, the gardener, idiot savant exemplar, is a disarmingly taciturn portrait, and the discerning centerpiece of Hal Ashby’s oft omitted masterpiece from 1979, Being There. Ashby directed several seminal pictures throughout the 1970s, including such substantial works as Harold […]
Author: Shane Scott-Travis
Pulling Focus: Whiplash (2014)
Are you one of those single tear people? I saw Whiplash for the first time at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival, in a packed house with director Damien Chazelle in attendance. I’d heard rumblings of distant thunder about the film earlier that year when it took Sundance by storm, and where it was dubbed […]
Pulling Focus: Johnny Guitar (1954)
“Johnny Guitar is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western.” – Roger Ebert Anyone can play guitar “I’m gonna kill you,” spits a venomous Emma Small, played with evil élan by Mercedes McCambridge, to the legendary Joan Crawford (Forsaking All Others, […]
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The 25 Best Erotic Thrillers of All Time
For whatever reasons, perhaps owing to puritanical societal views and an uptight body politic, films that detail eroticism are thought to be trashy, bottom of the barrel undertakings with little to offer beyond the cheapest of tawdry thrills. But boundary-pushing films needn’t all be about T and A and little else. Why some of the […]
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25 Films You Won’t Want to Miss at VIFF 2016
Now in its 35th year, the 2016 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival (September 29th – October 14th, 2016) looks to be the brightest, most eclectic and engaging yet. Among the five largest film festivals in North America with screenings from 70 countries, VIFF promises to have something intriguing and exciting for everyone from […]
Pulling Focus: Breaking the Waves (1996)
“Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is a genuinely spiritual movie that asks ‘what is love and what is compassion?’” – Martin Scorsese In a broken dream Set in remote North-West Scotland’s Outer Hebrides of the 1970s is the ill-at-ease and heart-rending romance of Lars von Trier’s paralyzing (and, alas, polarizing) melodrama, Breaking the […]