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Burt Lancaster Festival and The Farewell on Monday Morning Diary (August 5)
Screen cap from “The Farewell” by Sam Juliano And now August. The summer’s most emblematic month could last an eternity or wiz by, depending on your mindset. It is defined by excessive heat,...
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Allan Moyle’s Pump Up the Volume
By J.D. Lafrance Allan Moyle and John Hughes both make escapist teen movies that feature fantasy stories populated by easily relatable characters that exist in an idealized world. The teenagers that...
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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘SAWDUST AND TINSEL’“We’re both stuck, Anne–stuck like hell”
© 2019 by James Clark Back in 2011, when (at Wonders in the Dark) I foolishly assumed that Ingmar Bergman was one of a small horde of filmmakers (including, Billy Wilder) after something very...
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Burt Lancaster Festival on Monday Morning Diary (August 12)
by Sam Juliano Full speed ahead. We are already approaching the half-way point of August, with temperatures in general far more comfortable than there have been over the past month or so....
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Tim Hunter’s Tex
By J.D. Lafrance In the early 1980s, Disney struggled to become relevant and in the process decided to gamble on several live-action films that weren’t the kinds of projects the Mouse House were known...
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Burt Lancaster Festival on Monday Morning Diary (August 19)
by Sam Juliano I can’t thank everyone enough for their kinds and concerned words about Lucille in private messages on social media, in e mails and here at the site on the prior MMD. The latest news...
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North Dallas Forty
By J.D. Lafrance There are few sports movies that rise above the tried and true conventions of the genre. For every Bull Durham (1988) that gets it right, there are a hundred ones like The Scout...
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A stunning selection to the 57th Annual New York Film Festival, Honeyland,...
A film clip from “The Thing That Kills Me the Most” a short by Jay Giampietro that for the second time this year features me as the central virtual character in a short film that has been chosen for an...
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Walter Hill’s Extreme Prejudice
By J.D. Lafrance Film director Walter Hill has had, at times, a frustratingly and wildly uneven career that features stone cold classics (The Warriors) alongside baffling misfires (Crossroads). His...
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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘SHAME’“There isn’t much that gets through…”
© 2019 by James Clark With many Bergman films now having thrilled us by their confrontation of distemper and ecstasy, we could conclude that a standoff has reached its outer limits. But we...
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In view of Labor Day this week’s Monday Morning Diary will become the Tuesday...
Tomorrow (Monday, September 2) is Labor Day here stateside. As is the case often when we have a Monday holiday, I push the weekly diary round-up to one day later. Hence the scheduled Monday Morning...
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The Peanut Butter Falcon, Luce and Labor Day on Tuesday Morning Diary...
by Sam Juliano I trust everyone stateside had (or are enjoying at the time I am posting here) their Labor Day reprieve though in the New York City region is has been rainy. With a break from the heat...
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David Fincher’s Zodiac
by J.D. Lafrance After the technically accomplished but ultimately hollow thriller Panic Room (2002), director David Fincher returned to familiar subject matter with Zodiac (2007), a dramatization of...
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Tickets now on sale for “The Thing That Kills Me the Most” at Walter Reade...
by Sam Juliano Tickets for our short film “The Thing That Kills Me the Most” will go on sale on September 8 for the granddaddy of all USA film fests, the 57TH ANNUAL NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL. The short...
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Don Siegel’s The Killers
By J.D. Lafrance The first feature-length adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Killers” was directed by Robert Siodmak in 1946 and featured a young Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner as the...
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Jamie Uhler’s ‘Horrorfest,’ It, Give Me Liberty, Princeton Book Festival and...
Melanie and Jillian at Renaissance Faire by Sam Juliano It’s that time of the year again, the ‘horrific’ lead-up to Halloween and our compatriot Jamie Uhler’s premium investigation into classic and...
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
By J.D. Lafrance Jules Verne’s classic science fiction novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea has captivated and intrigued filmmakers for decades, from George Melies’ silent short film in 1907 to...
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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘HOUR OF THE WOLF’“You’re nothing but frightened…”
© 2019 by James Clark I kicked off the Bergman trilogy comprising the films, Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1969) and The Passion of Anna (1969), by way of Shame. But one could start anywhere...
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‘Ad Astra’ and Horror Fest 2019 on Monday Morning Diary (September 23)
by Sam Juliano We are approaching the Halloween season and with it here at Wonders in the Dark, our annual Horror Fest capsule reviews on some classic and contemporary works in the genre, courtesy of...
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Caldecott Medal Contender: Manhattan
by Sam Juliano The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and money-brokers, the river-streets, Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty...
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