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Within the first five minutes of  Checkered Ninja  (2018), a Danish computer-animated film that combines the style of Pixar with the attitude of Adult Swim, a child working in a Thai sweatshop is viciously beaten death with a stick.  The doll he was making comes to life and swears vengeance against the foreign toy tycoon is committed the crime.  So….yeah… Toy Story  it’s  not .     A huge hit in its native country, director Anders Matthesen’s film is a bit of a hard sell in North America, where animated films fall into two categories:  family-friendly or NSFW.   Checkered Ninja  straddles the line between both, adding plenty of crude language into the usual mix of fart jokes and groin hits.  It’s a distinctly odd experience, since the obvious target audience is pre-teens who should identify with its relatable protagonist, Alex, a 7 th  grader whose dream of being part of the cool crowd comes true thanks to his stuffed pal’s expert advice on love, parents and martial arts.   The animati

With title as all-encompassing as  Cinematographer  you might expect director Dan Asma’s 2022 documentary to be a comprehensive look at the art and history of the craft, profiling cinematic legends whose names are etched in celluloid.  But - to be blunt - it’s most definitely  not  that.  Asma’s film is a personal profile of Donald M. Morgan; not a name that pops into most cinephile’s heads, instead a journeyman DP who changed his style to suit the director and the medium.  His professional career might get the most attention (with movies like  Seven ,  Starman  and  Christine  under his belt), but it’s his personal impact on the lives of others that gets top billing.   A loose cannon in his youth, Morgan struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for years before finding steady work as an aerial cameraman.  Early collaborations with Robert Zemeckis led to steady feature and TV work, most notably a three-movie relationship with John Carpenter.  Morgan’s blue-collar approach (he rarely k

While Spaghetti Westerns took the best of their American counterparts and amped things up to eleven, Hong Kong cinema turned action movies into an invigorating experience of stylistic excess.  Before being absorbed into the Hollywood system, directors like John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam added their unique artistic stamp on the genre, building on their inspirations rather than churning out bland copies.  Filmmaker Johnnie To flies under the radar of most casual fans although he’s by far the most prolific.  So,  Running Out of Time  (1999) and its sequel from 2001 serve as a nice introduction to his talents and the evolution of Hong Kong action films overall. A buddy film with a twist,  Running Out of Time  pits police negotiator Ho Sheung-san against a mysterious criminal, Cheung Wah, who seems to have no motive other than staging a friendly competition.  After a staging a false heist by way of introduction, Wah challenges Ho to bring him in within 72 hours, setting off a string of c

Blending horror with social critique is nothing new.  In fact, it’s what makes the genre such an interesting – and underappreciated – cinematic bookmark.  Even slasher films, likely the most critically derided category, provide a case study for class warfare, generational angst and, ahem, mating habits.   Massacre at Central High  (1976) focuses the microscope even further than most, essentially restaging George Orwell’s classic  Animal Farm  with horny teens at a California high school. As the new kid in school David (Derrel Maury) is the focus of a lot of attention.  His old friend, Mark (Andrew Stevens), introduces him to the “in crowd,” a trio of macho dudes who rule the school through bullying, rape and intimidation.  Refusing to play along – and disgusted by his fellow student’s cowardice - David is crippled by a vicious attack that inspires him to take action.  Violent action.   The second half of writer / director Rene Daalder’s teen exploitation film drops all pretenses of bei

Best Of   lists are, of course, purely subjective.  But they’re still a whole lot of fun, and offer a good starting place for those interested in diving further down the rabbit hole of a complicated subject.  And it doesn’t get much more complicated than Japanese cinema; not only because many of its film have  never  made it to North American shores, but social and cultural eccentricities can make the focus too narrow for a foreign audience.  So Kinema Junpo’s (Japan’s oldest film magazine) 1999 list of the of the Top 100 Japanese Movies of all time is useful for new and old fans alike.  And sitting at #3 is director Tomu Uchida’s  A Fugitive from the Past  from 1965, an epic latter-day film noir that’s one of the most accessible titles on the list. Running from the law after a robbery gone wrong, Takichi Inukai shacks up for one night with a kind-hearted hooker, Yae Sugito, who takes an instant liking to him.  In the morning, he leaves her with a stack full of bills and disappears.  Y

No filmmaker sets out to create “content;” by any standard it’s an insulting term.  But streaming services are a black hole needing to be filled and, at the very least, it gives artists an opportunity to fine tune their craft and exposure on a scale beyond the festival circuit.  So how writer/director Nick Szostakiwskyj slipped between the cracks is a bit of a mystery.  His first film,  Black Mountain Side  (2014), was an ambitious low-budget take on the H.P. Lovecraft mythos that’s still available at the click of a button.  But his follow-up,  Archons  (2018), was held up from any sort of release for years.  How long?  Well, someone takes a selfie with a flip phone. Tired and uninspired after a worldwide tour, members of the one-hit wonder band Sled Dog take a canoe trip through the Canadian wilderness to get their mojo back.  Tensions within the group are already running high, but things get even worse when their plan to drop acid at each of the four checkpoints inspires paranoid del

2001  and  Star Wars  were the death knell for most cinematic sci-fi produced before their release.  Suddenly all the imaginative special effects used in films like  Forbidden Planet  just seemed hopelessly out of date.  And “C” movies like  Battle of the Worlds  (1961) were relegated to afternoon nostalgia items sold to local TV stations.  But, ironically, that sort of exposure created a fan base far beyond the film’s theatrical release, making Film Detective’s Blu-ray a welcome addition to the classic sci-fi home video library. Set sometime in the near future, Earth is threatened by a rogue planet from beyond the galaxy.  But rather than colliding, this “outsider” settles into a stable orbit perplexing scientists across the globe…except for the lovably arrogant Professor Benson (Claude Rains) who sees the incursion as a precursor to something much worse.  And he’s proven right when an exploratory mission to the orbiting body unleashes a fleet of death-dealing spaceships.  The only so