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Despite Taika Waititi‘s already heavy portfolio, the Kiwi director keeps adding to his slate of movies and other franchise projects, the most recent one being a live-action Judge Dredd film. The violent and bleak comic satire, which became hugely popular in the UK since its launch in the late 1970s, has been a Hollywood pet project for the longest time.

In the past, Sylvester Stallone tried and failed while Karl Urban somewhat succeeded in bringing the comic book character to life. However, this time around, the project will be a collaboration of the action-fanatic mind of Drew Pearce and the eccentric genius of Taika Waititi (The Hollywood Reporter).

But despite the made-to-be-successful pairing of the two, the future of Judge Dredd looks as bleak in reality as it does in the comics. And Waititi’s growing list of the following undeveloped projects is to blame for the growing suspicion...

Holed up in an attempt to go cold turkey before a crucial race, once-renowned jockey Remo (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) asks his pregnant partner and fellow jockey Abril (Úrsula Corberó), “What can I do to make you love me again?” To which she replies, “Die and be reborn.” Accordingly, director Luis Ortega sets out with Kill the Jockey to tell a prototypical sports-movie comeback story, albeit through far from conventional means.

Set in Buenos Aires, the film is a sports movie in the same way that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo is a western. It could just as easily be shelved under crime drama, rock mockumentary, or ghost story. While Ortega’s style doesn’t quite transcend the influence of filmmakers such as Lynch, Godard, Fellini, and Almodóvar, it melds them with surprising assurance. Kill the Jockey’s originality consists not just in taking the clichéd metaphor of rebirth literally, but...

The Dark Fantastic is an intimate and enthralling look at the vast career of acclaimed film composer Simon Boswell, an amazing musician who has created music for so many films, particularly in the horror and fantasy genres.

He was responsible for an audio spectrum, from Demons 2, Graveyard Disturbance and Phenomena to Hardware and Perdita Durango, as well as cult classics like Shallow Grave, Hackers and The Crying Game. Throughout his career Boswell has worked with the legendary likes of Lamberto Bava, Dario Argento and Clive Barker and has constantly created vast and compelling music for the films that they feature in. The Dark Fantastic tells the entire story of his career through both music and film.

Far from being a standard documentary where film clips are interspersed with interviews, The Dark Fantastic contains continuous live performances of music that Boswell has created, with details about the particular films and the making of them.

To paraphrase Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis: Wasn’t I lucky to come of age in my favorite city? For one thing, my impressionable undergraduate years fell during J. Hoberman’s tenure as lead film critic of the Village Voice, and his approach––which I would characterize as treating movies as artifacts or maybe symptoms of overlapping artistic, social, and political zeitgeists––was tremendously influential to me, as it has been to other critics attempting, for better or worse, to locate art in the world and maybe understand the world through art. A wag once observed that Hoberman’s year-end top 10 list was the rare opportunity to find out which movies he actually liked, but I can’t imagine having received a better education than the encouragement, implicit in his work, to set aside aesthetic hierarchies in favor of networks of associations and draw my own conclusions.

Metal Hurlant, the French comic book anthology from the 1970s and 80s credited with reshaping the contemporary sci-fi aesthetic and inspiring films such as “Alien,” “Tron,” “Blade Runner,” “Akira” and “The Fifth Element,” is returning on its 50th anniversary.

A new English-language quarterly edition of Metal Hurlant — first announced last year — is hitting shelves this week from publishers Humanoids, which launched the original in France in 1975. Variety can exclusively reveal several excerpts of new stories from the anthology alongside support from one of the biggest filmmakers working today.

Excerpt from ‘Respect’ by Matthew Allison

Metal Hurlant was first created by comic artists Jean Giraud (better known as Mœbius) and Philippe Druillet, together with journalist-writer Jean-Pierre Dionnet and finance director Bernand Farkas. Collectively, the four were known as “Les Humanoïdes Associés (United Humanoids), which became the name of their publishing house, first launched in Paris but now based in Los Angeles.

Nebraska director Alexander Payne will receive the Pardo d’Onore at the Locarno Film Festival.

The American filmmaker will be presented with the honorary leopard on Friday, August 15. He will also present his 2011 pic The Descendants and 2013 title Nebraska and participate in a public discussion.

Payne, a writer-director also behind the likes of Sideway and The Holdovers, has won two Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and been nominated for Best Director on three occasions.

After studying filmmaking at UCLA, Payne wrote and directed politically-charged comedy Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern, in 1996. It premiered at Sundance and led to a run of seven influential films, which have starred the likes of Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon and Jack Nicholson.

“Alexander Payne is an erudite auteur with an encyclopaedic cinephile knowledge,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival. “Gifted with an unerring sense for the bittersweet facets of human comedy,...

At the beginning of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel "Dune" -- set in the distant, distant future -- Duke Leto Atreides, the ruler of the ocean planet of Caladan, is assigned the task of overseeing the distant desert world of Arrakis by the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. Arrakis is particularly valuable to the galaxy, as it is the only known source of the spice Melange, a consciousness-expanding psychedelic substance that grants humans the skills they need to travel through deep space. Arrakis had previously been overseen by House Harkonnen, a wicked and greedy clan of hedonists, and House Atreides seemingly promised a more benevolent rule and gentle hand when overseeing spice production. The Atreides and the Harkonnens have long been bitter rivals.

Of course, Shaddam IV has a scheme of his own, and only assigned House Atreides to Arrakis for reasons of treachery. It seems that Duke Leto Atreides was becoming...

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The book-to-screen adaptation is a tried and true formula that has led to some of the best movies of all time, like "Jurassic Park" and "The Wizard of Oz," which unknowingly paved the way for the success of "Wicked." However, not all adaptations receive the same praise. Movies like "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" and the messy adaptation of "The Dark Tower" have been criticized for glossing over too many details. This proves that not all books, no matter how easy they might seem to adapt were meant for the big screen.

While some books are destined for a cinematic future, others have been deemed unfilmable. Perhaps a plot relies too heavily on mystical beings, sometimes tales are controversial and unsettling, which could turn away moviegoers. It's a label that some filmmakers walk away from, while others...

To mark Alien Day, we head back to the late 1970s to see how Hr Giger designed the Space Jockey – and its strange fate after the film’s premiere…

In the early hours of Tuesday, the 29th May 1979, someone killed the Space Jockey. Burned it alive, perhaps with a blowtorch or something more mundane like a match or a cigarette. The crime occurred four days after the premiere of Alien at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, and was reported on by at least one outlet at the time: sci-fi magazine, Starlog.

“The Los Angeles opening of Alien was marked by misfortune when a miniature version of the film’s ‘starpilot’ was destroyed with fire,” the news story ran, garbling the Space Jockey’s name somewhat. “It was set ablaze by vandals just hours after being placed on display in the forecourt of Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre. Additional objects on display in the lobby,...

Screambox has revealed the new films that are joining the Bloody Disgusting-powered horror streaming service in April, including Project Mkhexe, The Coffee Table, and Tammy and the T-Rex.

Nothing can prepare you for The Coffee Table, traumatizing Screambox on April 11. Stephen King said it best: “My guess is you have never, not once in your whole life, seen a movie as black as this one. It’s horrible and also horribly funny.”

Classic horror icons Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and John Carradine star together for the first and only time in House of the Long Shadows. The murderously funny mystery with a twist streams April 11 on Screambox.

It’s too late for prayers when Alice, Sweet Alice comes to Screambox on April 25. Also known as Communion, the ’70s proto-slasher stars Brooke Shields in her film debut.

The notorious R-rated cut of Tammy and the T-Rex stomps onto Screambox...

Bring Her Back: "Do You Want To Meet An Angel?

Watch the official trailer for Bring Her Back, a twisted new possession horror from ‘Talk to Me’ directors Danny and Michael Philippou.

Starring Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, and Sally Hawkins."

Synopsis: "A brother and sister uncover a terrifying ritual at the secluded home of their new foster mother."

In Theaters Everywhere May 30

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Words To Die By: "Crowdfunding to begin April 1st on the hilarious, haunting new card game where everyone dies! Words to Die By is a party game of theatrical horror flair, dark humor, and absurdly over-the-top death scenes. Players take on the roles of writers, directors, and actors, crafting the most ridiculous final moments imaginable.

Each round, the Director selects a Death Scene card, while players submit Dying Words to fit the moment. The Director adds a surprise Director’s Cut twist—like...

Photo by Nikola Predovic, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

by Chad Kennerk

Following the 2017 debut feature Patti Cake$, writer/director Geremy Jasper returns with an ambitious, genre-defying sophomore feature that blends music and mythology into a dystopian fantasy. The sci-fi fairy tale O’Dessa is inspired by Jasper’s adventures through the video store growing up and the music of the 70s and 80s. A musical odyssey into a warped, post-apocalyptic world, the mythic rock opera echoes the vibrant, dreamy aesthetics of filmmakers such as Terry Gilliam and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

In collaboration with long-time musical partner Jason Binnick, Jasper brought the world of O'Dessa to life, ensuring the music, story and characters work as one. The original music, ranging from folk to rock to avant-garde, was crafted in alignment with the story’s themes of hope, self-discovery and transformation amidst a bleak world. O'Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink) is a young troubadour on...

The road to the 2013 straight-to-home-media Wester/horror film "Gallowwalkers" was weirdly circuitous. Way back in 2005, Ain't It Cool News announced that Chow Yun-fat was working on a horror Western wherein he would play a bounty hunting gunslinger that fought zombies. That film was to be called "The Wretched" and would be overseen by the production companies Sheer Films and Patriot Pictures, with Andrew Goth serving as co-writer and director. AICN's scoop was also confirmed in an issue of Fangoria Magazine.

Chow must have dropped out, though, because the next update on the project came in 2008, also in an issue of Fangoria. "The Wretched" had since become a project titled "Gallowwalker." The film was still being co-written and directed by Goth, but Wesley Snipes (who's one of our best actors) was now slated to star alongside David DeCoteau regular Andrew Smith and wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, with shooting to take place in Namibia.

The 70s were a great decade for surrealistic motives and imagery in genre films—including such incredible gems as Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, Louis Malle's Black Moon and Dario Argento's Suspiria. And then came another great example of surrealist cinema out of Eastern Europe in the form of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. Directed by Jaromil Jires, it was a part of the Czechoslovakian New Wave, but came off as avant-garde and daring even for this pretty liberated movement. The film did face its fair share of obstacles, but ended up reaching a worldwide audience that had seen many versions of a coming-of-age story by that time. However, none of them tackled this topic like this: depicting the weird place between innocent childhood and inevitable adulthood, specifically shown through the perspective of female experience, in such an uncompromisingly surreal way.

Movies To Watch If You Liked ‘The Electric State’ on Netflix: Anthony and Joe Russo have had one of the most fascinating career trajectories of any filmmakers working in Hollywood. Despite having only a few comedy features to their name, the duo was hired to revolutionize the Marvel Cinematic Universe when they crafted “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which was instantly hailed as one of the greatest comic book films ever made. Although the Russo brothers continued to earn praise for their subsequent work on “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame,” their work outside of Marvel Studios has been rather disappointing.

The Russo brothers’ latest film is “The Electric State,” a post-apocalyptic science fiction action comedy that is based on an acclaimed graphic novel of the same name. Although a $320 million budget and the involvement of stars like Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown would suggest great things,...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival. “Ash” opens in theaters Friday, March 21.

Usually, when someone says a movie is “all vibes,” they mean it as an insult. But vibes can accomplish some wonderful things: Just ask Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dario Argento, Amy Seimetz, Panos Cosmatos, and now Flying Lotus. Born Steven D. Bingley-Ellison, the musician and record producer claims his place in the pantheon of vibes-based filmmakers with “Ash,” a pummeling psychedelic sci-fi freakout that one doesn’t watch so much as experience.

Don’t let the green mist tinged with white lightning and rotating cosmic orifices fool you, however: Ingesting psychedelic drugs is not recommended before watching this film. Like Brandon Cronenberg’s “Possessor,” “Ash” makes extensive use of cut-ins that violently tear through the frame, jarring the audience with nightmarish imagery that’s disarming under normal circumstances and probably soul-searingly terrifying...

The beginning of 2025 saw the tragic loss of David Lynch, a one-of-a-kind filmmaker whose unique vision and groundbreaking filmography have shaped a generation of moviegoers and cinephiles. In light of his passing, David Lynch enthusiasts, both old and new, have been revisiting the director's vast back catalog, which consists of various shorts, television projects, and feature films. In March, Paramount+ will be home to two more of Lynch's works for viewers to enjoy, with his 1984 adaptation of Dune and his seminal work Mulholland Drive hitting the streaming platform on March 1st. Both movies represent different highs (and lows) in the director's storied career and speak to his unmatched influence on genre films that continues to this day.

David Lynch's Dune was the director's first big studio production, and the process of bringing Frank Herbert's ambitious and sprawling novel to life was no easy feat for the filmmaker. A...

German movies of the 1970s will forever be linked with the New German Cinema movement, the auteur directors — led by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff — who shook the country out of its postwar stupor. “Papa’s Kino ist tot” (‘Papa’s cinema’s is dead’) was their motto, and they held radical new visions of what movies could do.

But alongside this art house wave, ’70s Germany also was a breeding ground for a cruder, more commercial strain of cinema, one that took inspiration from sexploitation and spaghetti Westerns, biker films and grindhouse horror and grafted it onto the zeitgeist-y themes of political upheaval and sexual liberation. The Berlinale pays tribute to this seldom-seen oeuvre of German genre cinema in its 2025 retrospective, which features 15 titles — cult classics and curios from both East and West Germany — that prove that German film could also be “wild,...

Few directors made films that seemed almost engineered to play exclusively to midnight movie audiences quite like Alejandro Jodorowsky. The Chilean-born auteur became a cult sensation with his second feature film, El Topo, which kicked off a whole sub-genre known as the Acid Western. That's perhaps the best way to describe this metaphorical head trip, which was a favorite of Roger Ebert's. What Ebert understood that some other critics at the time didn't was that the destination of El Topo wasn't the point: it was the journey. Jodorowsky's surreal, indescribable saga came at just the right time for audiences searching for truth through drugs, activism, and cinema.

The most infamous film of the late David Lynch is undoubtedly Dune, the ambitious first adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel that crashed and burned upon release in 1984. Lynch himself refused to talk about the experience, which ended with the movie being taken out of his hands and recut. Thankfully, his career survived, and his next film -- 1986's Blue Velvet-- has since become a classic. Dune has been left as a curiosity, with the recent two-film adaptation from Denis Villeneuve outranking it in every way.

Despite that and Lynch's public disavowal of the film, the 1984 version of Dune has assets of its own. Unquestionably a failure, its ambition and scope carry real power, as well as a glimpse of what someone like Lynch could accomplish with an A-list budget. Had he completed the film as he wished, it might have changed everything, and from time to time, viewers...

Mimicking the surreal whimsy of dream logic has proved difficult across film, music, and fiction mediums. Any project by the late, great David Lynchor avant-garde icon, Alejandro Jodorowsky, has an absurdist tinge to it. Fans have long praised Lynch and Jodorowsky’s projects for possessing this abstract logic with vivid imagery. In Anthony Scott Burns’ 2020 release, Come True, the hazy strangeness is not a vibe, but the meat of the film. Burns accurately recreates the fractured, often frightening logic of dreams and nightmares on the silver screen for a science-fiction horror that will have the audience wondering if they’re trapped inside lead character Sara's dreams, too!

Quick Links Denis Villeneuve Wasn’t Nominated for Best Director Dune: Part Two Was Nominated in Other Categories Dune: Messiah Could Receive The Return of the King Treatment

The Dune franchise had quite a history leading up to the 2021 film, which told the first half of the Frank Herbert book. After his stellar work on Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve tackled Dune, a project some considered "unfilmable" because of how dense the source material is. Alejandro Jodorowsky notoriously tried to get an adaptation off the ground in the 1970s, and a documentary in 2013 revealed how the unmade film still had an impact on sci-fi and fantasy films that came out years later. The late David Lynch was able to get Dune on the big screen, but the film wasn't well received, even by Lynch himself. A Dune adaptation also made its way to television in the early 2000s on SyFy,...

David Lynch was, is, and will always remain one of the most significant voices challenging cinema’s boundaries as a spiritual art form. Some directors make films for the mind, others make films for the soul; Lynch had it both ways, insofar as his incorporeally inclined vision was one that, clearly, came about from the recesses of a brain that knew exactly what it wanted to say, and how it wanted to say it. We may not have understood exactly what Lynch was going for and why, but those films were all the better for it. In honor of the man taken far too soon, we find it fitting to examine all of David Lynch’s movies to determine where they rank amongst one another.

Though it goes without saying that rankings are rather arbitrary, such a distinction seems especially necessary in the case of Lynch, whose broad appeal seemed...

Kill your darlings” is a phrase attributed to William Faulkner, advising writers to resist overuse of their favorite expressions, tropes, characters, etc. This is true for any writing, wherein emotional proximity to the work might manifest into myopic creations in the grander scheme of things. However canonized this belief is, the hypothesis falls apart for Nicolas Winding Refn.

Armed with a style that has only grown more distinctive with every new film, Refn explores fundamental themes and deploys the camera to shift between fluidity and limbo. With sensibilities similar to a master architect, Refn uses frames to create moments that let the viewer internalize, and experience on a physio-psychological level, a creation that does not confine itself to a two-dimensional rectangle, but reminds you of what was felt while watching it. This is the moment the Nicolas Winding Refn effect kicks in, and this is when cinema affects one on a deeply personal level.

Screen Rant is thrilled to present an exclusive first look at the return of legendary French sci-fi magazine Metal Hurlant, which comes back into print in time for its 50th anniversary celebration courtesy of publisher Humanoids something legendary film composer Hans Zimmer has been waiting forever for. Humanoids' shared a video of Zimmer teasing the book's new era, giving readers a sense of Metal Hurlant's pop culture impact.

Humanoids' Metal Hurlant is available to back on Kickstarter now; along with the message from Hans Zimmer, the publisher also shared pages from a brand-new story by artist Mbius, one of the original contributors to the magazine. Humanoids also offered an exclusive preview of cover art for the series by some of the industry's top artists, including rising superstar Peach Momoko, done in the style of the original print run.

Additionally, Humanoids provided a detailed list of the incentives for the Kickstarter campaign,...

Half a century after the groundbreaking release of the first issue of Metal Hurlant in France, the endlessly influential comic book anthology will return to print in English in early 2025 as a quarterly publication from Humanoids, and with a Kickstarter campaign now underway as part of Humanoids' 50th anniversary celebrations, we've been provided with an exclusive excerpt that invites readers to check into Elene Usdin's “Nightmare Motel,” one of the many unique stories that will be featured in the first year of the new Metal Hurlant.

Below, you can check out our exclusive preview pages from Elene Usdin's “Nightmare Motel,” as well as cover art and the official press release with additional details. To learn more about the return of Metal Hurlant, visit:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/humanoidsinc/metal-hurlant?ref=ch8qc6

Press Release: Los Angeles, November 13, 2024 – In 1974, filmmaker, writer, mime, and poet Alejandro Jodorowsky was working in...

Streaming on: Sky / Now

Episodes viewed: 4 of 6

Frank Herbert’s Dune has always proved fatally hard to adapt. It is material that tripped up filmmakers like David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky; only Denis Villeneuve, with his superb 2021 and 2024 films, has had any luck. You can understand why. It is the hardest of hard sci-fi, the most operatic of space opera, and about as weird as it comes: giant worm-gods, royal incest, psychic mutants, elite lesbian soldiers known as ‘Fish Speakers’, and a musical-instrument planet known as Chusuk, to just scratch the surface.

Dune: Prophecy decides to stretch back into the lore. Loosely adapting the novel Sisterhood Of Dune by Herbert’s son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson, it focuses on the early days of the mysterious Sisterhood — later the Bene Gesserit — the puppet masters behind the entire Imperium. Having stalked the wings of Villeneuve’s films, the dark-cloaked sorcerers take...

While there aren’t any movies quite like Coralie Fergeat’s “The Substance,” there are plenty of over-the-top horror films about transformation, incredibly weird science, shared identities and losing your damn mind, like the 1981 cult movie “Possession,” pretty much every David Cronenberg movie, as well as offerings from Ken Russell, Peter Strickland, Julia Ducournau and Ari Aster.

Expect screaming, exploding heads, lots of blood and some of the most insane endings ever.

Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill in “Possession” (Credit: Gaumont) Possession (1981)

Isabelle Adjani has the mother of all freakouts in a subway in this role that earned her a César for Best Actress (the French equivalent of the Oscars) and Best Actress at the Cannes Film Fest that year, but that’s not even the most mind-blowing part of the movie form Polish director Andrzej Żuławski. She’s also cheating on her husband (Sam Neill) with something that isn’t really human.

Reflecting the breadth of her legacy across different continents, French actor Isabelle Huppert was celebrated by the likes of Alfonso Cuarón, Claire Denis, Alejandro Jodorowsky and François Ozon at the 15th edition of the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon where she received a sprawling career tribute on Oct. 18.

Huppert kicked off the festivities as she entered the 3000-seat auditorium dancing to the 1980’s disco beats of “Nuit de folie,” dressed in a shimmery champagne gown.

The joyful ceremony, emceed by Huppert’s longtime friend (and Cannes boss) Thierry Fremaux who runs the Lumiere Film Festival, was punctuated by live musical numbers ranging widely from Camelia Jordana’s singing a capella “I Will Survive,” to Julien Clerc performing his 1978 cult song “Ma Preference” by the piano, and French actor Sandrine Kiberlain playfully singing “Nuit de folie” which was said to be Huppert’s unexpected all-time favorite song.

The most vibrant homage...

The 16th edition of the Lumière Film Festival kicked off in high style, with a glittering lineup of stars including Benicio del Toro, Tim Burton, Monica Bellucci and Vanessa Paradis plus high-profile directors Costa-Gavras and Giuseppe Tornatore gracing the red carpet in Lyon.

Bellucci, who’s in town to present a new documentary about the stage play in which she portrays Maria Callas, was among the last to take to the red carpet. After taking a few steps, she turned back with a playful gesture as if she had forgotten something, reached through the curtain, and drew out Tim Burton, to the delight of the 5,000-strong crowd: Burton’s unannounced appearance drew massive applause.

The pair famously met and fell in love in Lyon in 2022, when Burton was the recipient of the festival’s lifetime achievement Lumière Award, which was handed to him by Bellucci. The Italian actress has since...

In a scene near the end of Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaalí!, Judith (Anaïs Demoustier), a French journalist assigned to interview Salvador Dalí, is riding the bus, in the doldrums after the latest failure to capture her mercurial subject on film. The facial hair of the man seated across from her reminds her of Dalí’s iconic mustache, and after Judith aks him if it’s an intentional homage, he retreats behind his newspaper. The front-page headline reads, “Barista Lets Off Steam on Paris Bus”—a reference to the insult that Judith’s producer (Romain Duris) calls her—with a photograph of Judith below. Dupieux then cuts to a reverse shot of her that begins as a perfect match of the photo, one of countless flourishes of dream logic in the film that subvert conventional cinematic handling of time and space.

That there are almost as many actors portraying Dalí as...

A straightforward, simple-to-understand film can be enjoyable enough under the right circumstances; but every now then, cinephiles get an irresistible craving for a surreal, dreamlike experience that'll not just leave them scratching their heads, but also end up proving to be an effectively disturbing experience. From David Lynch to Alejandro Jodorowsky, there are plenty of directors more than capable of scratching that itch.

Tarsem’s The Fall is now showing exclusively on Mubi.A version of the following interview was originally published in Pardo, the Locarno Film Festival’s official daily magazine. The conversation has been expanded and edited for republication on Notebook.The Fall.“If Andrei Tarkovsky made The Wizard of Oz”—that’s how David Fincher summed up his friend Tarsem’s globe-spanning, decades-in-the-making magnum opus, The Fall (2006). This shapeshifting fable about the art and power of storytelling is maybe more Alejandro Jodorowsky than Tarkovsky, but, most importantly, it’s all Tarsem.Tarsem: the mononym is of a piece with his bold, brazen style. Like his film-school peers Michael Bay and Zack Snyder, the Punjab-born Tarsem is a bona fide vulgar auteur. He was still a student when he made his first hit music video, for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” (1991). A young Tarsem Singh Dhandwar had arrived in...

Like any movie genre, the Western has its fair share of popular subgenres. Well-known Western subgenres include neo-Westerns, revisionist Westerns, and spaghetti Westerns. More obscure Western subgenres include acid Westerns, meat pie Westerns, and weird Westerns. Influential film critic Pauline Kael coined the term acid Western in 1971 in her review of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo.

In the mid-1990s, Jonathan Rosenbaum expanded upon the definition of acid Westerns. He noted acid Westerns are a type of revisionist Western that reflected the counterculture ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s. Acid Westerns have a hallucinogenic quality that is often aided by surrealist imagery. Rosenbaum also stated that in traditional Westerns, a character's journey West resulted in freedom and prosperity. In Acid Westerns, Rosenbaum argued a character's journey is a march toward death. Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid...

Fernando Arrabal’s Viva la Muerte is a mostly autobiographical account of the filmmaker’s youth during the Spanish Civil War that intermingles with disturbingly surreal dreams and fantasies. This alienation effect is rendered all the more unsettling since Arrabal opts to shoot the imaginal sequences on heavily color-filtered video, aligning them with Nam June Paik’s avant-garde video art. Another sort of alienation may stem from some unsimulated violence against animals, in particular a jaw-dropping scene in a slaughterhouse that combines the in-your-face verité of Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts with the dynamic writhing of Isadora Duncan.

Viva la Muerte opens at the end of the war, with a jeep full of fascist soldiers declaring the titular phrase and vowing to kill half of Spain’s population if that’s what it takes to cleanse the nation from the pernicious influence of atheism and communism. Young Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) looks on,...

Quick Links How Ridley Scott's Dune Could Have Advanced Alejandro Jodorowsky's Prep Work Scott Used H.R. Giger's Artwork for His Version of Dune Elements of Scott's Dune Development Presaged Denis Villeneuve's Later Adaptation A Tragic Loss Led to Scott's Self-Dismissal from Dune Ultimately, Scott May Have Made the Right Decision

Not long after the 1965 publishing of Frank Herbert's sprawling, best-selling science fiction novel, Dune, early attempts were made at adapting the book into a film. A movie option was originally purchased in 1971 by producer Arthur P. Jacobs which went into the early stages of development with Lawrence of Arabia director David Lean attached to direct.

Jacobs, however, tragically passed away in 1973, reverting the rights temporarily until they were purchased by a French film group that tasked director Alejandro Jodorowsky with developing Dune in 1974. Jodorowsky won fame (and infamy) for his 'Acid Western' films like El Topo,...

“All you have to do,” says author Shawn Levy, who wrote King of Comedy, the definitive Jerry Lewis biography, is to give the plot summary. “If you just tell people: Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a drama about a clown in a concentration camp leading children into the gas chambers, people say: ‘What? How have I never heard of this movie, how have I never seen it?’ “

You haven’t seen the film, The Day the Clown Cried. No one has. Jerry Lewis shot it in 1972, but it was never released. And it never will be. It is one of the last white whales of lost cinema, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune or Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, except Jodorowsky never got to shoot a single frame of his Arrakis epic. And Welles’ opus was eventually finished, 48 years later, thanks to Netflix money. It screened...

Quick Links Zardoz Cast and Plot Zardoz Was a Commercial Failure Why Zardoz Is a So-Bad-It's-Good Gem

Beloved actor of the silver screen, made iconic for his performances as James Bond, Ramirez in Highlander, and John Patrick Mason in 1996's The Rock, Sean Connery created an impressive body of work before his passing on October 31, 2020. Still, some of his work did not withstand the test of time, and others were complete flops from the get-go. One can look at the 1974 flop Zardoz as an example of both, a movie that some say was ahead of its time, while others call it a self-indulgent passion project that should never have been released to theaters.

The '70s sci-fi drama/philosophical/dystopian movie certainly confused audiences at the box office with its weird visual direction and heavy themes, but decades later, the movie has stood as an underrated gem for cult film fans and the so-bad-its-good crowd.

Metal Baby

August has been a wild ride so far. Between art house discussions of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre (listen) and Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula (listen), we squeezed in a look at screenlife sequel Unfriended: Dark Web (listen). Now we’re ready for more contemporary foreign content with Julia Ducournau‘s sophomore feature, Titane (2021).

In the film, after a run of poorly timed murders, serial killer Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) goes on the run from the police. After shaving her head and breaking her nose, Alexia disguises herself as “Adrien,” the long-missing son of aging fire captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon).

The distraught father pledges to protect his offspring from harm, but considering Alexia’s literal Cadillac ride (ie: sex) has resulted in pregnancy, how long can Alexia or Vincent keep up the ruse? And what happens if/when the truth comes out?

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Alejandro Jodorowsky's ambitious vision for Dune led to the most significant cinematic failure ever. Special effects supervisor Dan O'Bannon turned his failed Dune dreams into the screenplay for Alien. Documentaries like Jodorowsky's Dune and Memory chronicle the evolution of Alien arising from Dune's ashes. (104)

Thanks to the gigantic success of Denis Villeneuve's recent adaptations of Dune, everyone seems to know about David Lynch's first attempt to turn that epic story into a feature film that, unfortunately, turned into one of the biggest disappointments in cinematic history. The story of the first attempt to adapt Dune for the silver screen is lesser known and flamed out even more spectacularly than Lynch's, leading to the development of one of the most iconic horror films ever made.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, a filmmaker with a potent vision for Dune, was in charge of this first adaptation. His dream was to make an epic ten-hour film,...

Wirgin Worries.

After kicking off August with discussions of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surrealist masterpiece Santa Sangre (listen) and the screenlife sequel Unfriended: Dark Web (listen), we’re returning to the world of Andy Warhol with a look at Paul Morrissey‘s Udo Kier-starring vehicle Blood for Dracula (1974).

In the film, the deathly ill Count Dracula (Udo Kier) and his slimy underling Anton (Arno Juerging) travel to Italy in search of a virgin’s blood (the only type of blood he can drink). They’re welcomed at the crumbling estate of indebted Marchese Di Fiore (Vittorio De Sica), who’s desperate to marry off his daughters to rich suitors. But there, instead of pure women, the count encounters siblings with impure (aka not virgin) blood and their Marxist manservant Mario (Joe D’Allesandro), who’s suspicious of the aristocratic Dracula.

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Alejandro Jodorowsky blends Western clichs, surreal elements, and drug culture in El Topo, creating arguably the best acid Western. El Topo is full of symbolism and unexplained, illogical facets that defy traditional storytelling. The film found distribution through a midnight screening, attracting attention from the Beatles and serving as a mind-altering experience.

Clint Eastwoods A Fistful of Dollars. Lee Van Cleefs Death Rides a Horse. Franco Neros Django. These are just some of the more popular spaghetti Westerns of the mid-1960s. While cinematic historians still appreciate this now antiquated subgenre, Westerns as a whole were offered another kind of thematic spin-off a few years later that goes relatively unnoticed these days. Enter the Chilean and French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. First crafting a short 20-minute surreal production called The Severed Heads in the late 50s, he then co-founded an art collective called The Panic Movement (which was inspired by the...

Alain Delon, the French star who shot to stardom during the 1960s with films like Il Gattopardo (1963) and Le Samoura (1967), has passed away at the age of 88 years old in Douchy, France, in the company of his family. Delon was reported to have spent his last months on his estate, and his family has confirmed he died peacefully in his home, per a Variety report.

Born in Sceaux, France, in 1935, the actor is considered one of the most influential leading men of his generation. His work with directors like Jean-Pierre Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Victoni, and Jean-Luc Godard was internationally acclaimed and always put him in the spotlight as one of the valued European actors everyone sought for their films in the '60s and '70s. However, he wasn't very keen on participating in every movie he was offered. His career was primarily based on French cinema.

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Mateo

After wrapping up July with a Jan de Bont double feature discussing the movie magic of Twister (listen) and the laundry list of problems with his 1999 remake of The Haunting (listen), we’re tackled our first Alejandro Jodorowsky film with Santa Sangre (listen).

Now we’re back on American soil for our first Screenlife horror film on the Main Feed: Stephen Susco‘s Unfriended sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web (2018).

In the movie, Matias (Colin Woodell) shows up for virtual game night with a new laptop. As his friends – conspiracy nut Aj (Connor Del Rio), British Damon (Andrew Lees), harangued Lexx (Savira Windyani), and lesbian couple Nari (Betty Gabriel) and Serena (Rebecca Rittenhouse) – play Cards Against Humanity, Matias discovers hidden video files on the stolen computer.

The realization leads him to Charon (Douglas Tait) and Erica Dunne (Alexa Mansour), a missing 17 year old as Matias, his deaf girlfriend Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras...

Severin Films is taking over Brain Dead Studios in Los Angeles for its annual Super-Shock Pop-Up Film Festival Triple Feature on Saturday, August 24.

Viewers will be treated to a one-night-only screening of three mystery titles that will be released by Severin on 4K Uhd/Blu-ray in the coming year, along with trailer reveals, free swag, and a wide selection of Severin merch.

“Super-Shock is part fan appreciation event, part future-titles reveal, and 100% Severin Films gala celebration,” says Severin president David Gregory. “This year promises to our biggest and best yet.”

Founded in 2006, Severin Films is dedicated to the world’s most provocative cinema for physical media, theatrical, streaming, and beyond. Their catalog includes films from Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dennis Hopper, Joko Anwar, Alex de la Iglesia, Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi, Paul Morrissey, Jess Franco, and many more.

Brain Dead Studios is located at 611 N Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles,...

Elephants, Eagles & Chickens, Oh My!

After wrapping up July with a Jan de Bont double feature discussing the movie magic of Twister (listen) and the laundry list of problems with his 1999 remake of The Haunting (listen), we’re heading down to Mexico City to discuss Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s surrealist masterpiece Santa Sangre (1989).

Santa Sangre sees Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky), a former circus magician, escape from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless mother Concha (Blanca Guerra), the leader of a strange religious cult. Once they are reunited, Fenix is forced to enact brutal murders on Concha’s behalf as he becomes “her arms.” Only a figure from his past, the deaf mute tightrope walker Alma (Sabrina Dennison), can stop him before he murders again; but will she be able to reach him in time?

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Stars: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, Faviola Elenka Tapia, Teo Jodorowsky, Sergio Bustamante | Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Roberto Leoni, Claudio Argento | Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre is an audacious, surreal journey through trauma, redemption, and the labyrinthine corridors of the human psyche. This film, a quintessential piece of cinematic surrealism, combines elements of horror, drama, and psychological thriller to create a visually stunning and emotionally intense experience. The film follows the life of Fenix, a boy raised in a circus who endures a series of traumatic events, including witnessing his father’s violent behavior and his mother’s descent into madness. The narrative unfolds in a non-linear fashion, interweaving past and present, reality and hallucination, to depict Fenix’s struggle with his haunting memories and his quest for liberation.

Jodorowsky is known for his rich, symbolic imagery and Santa Sangre is no exception.

I don’t have the highest opinion of the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky, to put it mildly. (See my post on the Moebius/Jodorowsky product Madwoman of the Sacred Heart for a fuller rant.) I tend to think Moebius had massive tendencies towards self-indulgence at best, and that Jodorowsky fed into those, adding a soupy Euro mystic vagueness on top, like a light fog that makes everything unclear.

But I like books that I react strongly to – even if that reaction is not actually positive. The point of art is to make people feel, and revulsion and disdain is a feeling, he said somewhat puckishly. So I keep giving Jodorowsky chances, in large part because other readers – people who I otherwise respect – said consistently for decades that there really was a there there.

Thus The Eyes of the Cat , their 1978 collaboration – I think the first time they worked together, a...

I don’t have the highest opinion of the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky, to put it mildly. (See my post on the Moebius/Jodorowsky product Madwoman of the Sacred Heart for a fuller rant.) I tend to think Moebius had massive tendencies towards self-indulgence at best, and that Jodorowsky fed into those, adding a soupy Euro mystic vagueness on top, like a light fog that makes everything unclear.

But I like books that I react strongly to – even if that reaction is not actually positive. The point of art is to make people feel, and revulsion and disdain is a feeling, he said somewhat puckishly. So I keep giving Jodorowsky chances, in large part because other readers – people who I otherwise respect – said consistently for decades that there really was a there there.

Thus The Eyes of the Cat , their 1978 collaboration – I think the first time they worked together, a...

“Final Cut” means a director gets the last word on editing a movie. But usually, contracts and studio decisions don’t let this happen. So, many directors end up just working on projects without having any real control.

Still from Dune (1984) (Universal Pictures)

As a result, even if the final version of a movie pleases the audience, it often doesn’t fully satisfy because it may lack the depth and originality that the director’s vision would have provided. The filmmaker plays a crucial role in interpreting the script and bringing the story to life. If the their vision isn’t considered, the chances of poor reviews are high. This is exactly what happened to David Lynch when he directed Dune.

The 1984 Version Of Dune Was A Failure Still from Dune (1984) (Universal Pictures)

Dune (2021), and especially Dune: Part 2, released this year, were massive hits. The sequel alone grossed over $700 million worldwide,...