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With the third installment of their Danza Macabra series, the fine, twisted folks at Severin Films shift focus from the boot of Italy to the Iberian peninsula. This collection spotlights four fascinating Spanish examples of the sort of moody gothic filmmaking that Italian directors like Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti, not to mention Hammer Films in Britain, helped to popularize for international markets.

Rife with reptilian monsters, vampires, zombified Knights Templar, and even a cameo from Frankenstein and his misbegotten creation, these films vary considerably in tone and approach, ranging from rambling shaggy-dog tales to almost esoteric fables. They also differ in how far they’re willing to go with their respective lashings of sex and violence, growing bolder as the restrictions of the Franco regime lifted after the dictator’s passing in 1975.

Writer-director Miguel Madrid’s schizoid Necrophagous, from 1971, divides its time between two principal storylines that barely cohere in the end.

Claude Chabrol’s ‘minor’ wartime drama is one of the best movies of its kind I’ve seen. A French town under German rule lies on a river straddling occupied and Vichy territories, and becomes a hotbed of intrigues. Yes, there’s resistance activity, but we also see that most people avoid involvement — and some find ways to profit from the desperation of refugees fleeing the Nazis. It’s a case of small town, everyday terror. The stellar cast is subordinated to the powerful, non-exploitative drama: Jean Seberg, Maurice Ronet, Daniel Gélin, Jacques Perrin & Stéphane Audran. Samm Deighan’s informative commentary is a big +Plus.

Line of Demarcation

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1966 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 121 min. / Street Date February 25, 2020 / La ligne de démarcation / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jean Seberg, Maurice Ronet, Daniel Gélin, Jacques Perrin, Stéphane Audran, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Claude Léveillée, Roger Dumas, Jean Yanne, Jean-Louis Maury, Pierre Gualdi,...

The Great Work Begins: Scenes from Angels In America, director Ellie Heyman’s star-packed, virtual reimagining of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic, has been named the year’s Outstanding Digital Theater production by the Drama League.

The award — one of five categories created by the Drama League specifically for this year’s pandemic-altered theater season — was announced Friday night at the 87th annual Drama League Awards, streamed worldwide through the interactive Awards Room platform.

For the first time since the league began presenting awards in 1922, theater companies and productions beyond New York’s Broadway and Off Broadway were able to compete, reflecting the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic shutdown season. Theater artists from across the nation who created digital and socially distanced theatrical productions were eligible in the five newly created categories.

In all, the 33 nominated productions, which premiered between March 12, 2020 and March 15, 2021, were selected from submissions by more...

Bill Curran, a former Propaganda Films executive who also worked in advertising and marketing during his career, died Sept. 18 of prostate cancer in Los Angeles, his family announced. He was 73.

In 1988, Curran became the first executive producer and head of commercial production for Propaganda Films, the music video and film company founded by Steve Golin and Sigurjón Sighvatsson. With his help, Propaganda was producing one-third of the industry's music videos two years later.

Curran also managed large-scale productions for such firms as J. Walter Thompson, Foote Cone & Belding, David and Goliath, Rubin Postaer and ...

Bill Curran, a former Propaganda Films executive who also worked in advertising and marketing during his career, died Sept. 18 of prostate cancer in Los Angeles, his family announced. He was 73.

In 1988, Curran became the first executive producer and head of commercial production for Propaganda Films, the music video and film company founded by Steve Golin and Sigurjón Sighvatsson. With his help, Propaganda was producing one-third of the industry's music videos two years later.

Curran also managed large-scale productions for such firms as J. Walter Thompson, Foote Cone & Belding, David and Goliath, Rubin Postaer and ...

Ifp, Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today the public events for the upcoming 40th anniversary edition of Ifp Week, its signature event. Taking place from September 15-20, 2018, the programs will include public screenings and talks, “all centered on cutting-edge independent content for the big screen, the small screen, and now your headphones.” From the press release: Under the leadership of Head of Programming Amy Dotson and Programming Producer Bill Curran, the Ifp Week public talks and events take place in and around Brooklyn, NY at Bric, The William Vale Hotel, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Dumbo Loft, and Ifp’s headquarters, the Made in […]...

Ifp, Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today the public events for the upcoming 40th anniversary edition of Ifp Week, its signature event. Taking place from September 15-20, 2018, the programs will include public screenings and talks, “all centered on cutting-edge independent content for the big screen, the small screen, and now your headphones.” From the press release: Under the leadership of Head of Programming Amy Dotson and Programming Producer Bill Curran, the Ifp Week public talks and events take place in and around Brooklyn, NY at Bric, The William Vale Hotel, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Dumbo Loft, and Ifp’s headquarters, the Made in […]...

“Podcasting has just been invented as a medium, and no one knows what a fiction podcast is,” said John Dryden, Director of Scripted Content at Panoply Media, at last week’s Ifp Audio Thought Leader Summit at the Made in New York Media Center. “It’s just not a radio drama. Radio drama has been dead in the U.S. for 50 years, so we are starting from scratch.” Dryden was speaking along with Leital Molad, First Look Media’s Executive Producer, Podcasts, on a panel titled “New Fiction: Developing Scripted Narrative Podcasts,” moderated by the Media Center’s Programming Producer Bill Curran. Between the […]...

by Bill Curran

Laying in regal and rotting repose, the glorious tendrils of a white M-shaped wig framing his ashen face, King Louis Xiv of France, in the year 1717, spends his final days dying atop luxurious satins and attended to by hand-wringing bureaucrats and a largely silent wife in Albert Serra’s (you guessed it) The Death of Louis Xiv.

As far as “death trip” movies go, Louis Xiv is a quintessential ordeal. Like moths around the flame, the films in this still-thriving trend announce the demise (or prolonged distress) of their subjects up front, with imminence and duration the focus, often with a titular clue to the narrative framework: The Passion of the Christ, Last Days, 12 Years a Slave, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, 127 Hours, Day Night Day Night, Hunger, Two Days, One Night, and Son of Saul, to name but a few...

It's Noirvember. Here's Bill Curran on a Robert Aldrich's neo-noir

The world turned upside down, inside out. Film noir depends on following innate impulses to that most ultimate, unthinkable, irrational end: death. Noir explores that nasty thing called "human nature, revealing (and revelling in) the elemental urges that really make us tick. Noir unmasks the mechanics of this crazy world with some variation on a guy, a girl, and a gun. Upending sexual-patriarchal dynamics, leveling the tenants of justice and who is responsible for carrying it out, filming what we do in the shadows in the half-light: when you flip the script on taste and convention, you can learn a lot about how topsy-turvy this whole mess called Earth can be.

Kiss Me Deadly stews in and subverts these genre contradictions more brazenly than almost any other film noir before or since, perhaps because it is, in the end,...

Bill Curran reporting from the New York Film Festival. Hot takes on two titles...

Hermia and Helena

Matías Piñeiro’s newest Bard-based roundelay belongs to that venerable arthouse tradition, the stranger-here-in-this-town movie. Far from attempting a fully foreign pose, the Argentina-bred but Brooklyn-living Piñeiro is driven by the same impulse found in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon and Wim Wender’s 70’s USA road trilogy: flaunt the outsider perspective. When Carmen (Maria Villar) hustles back to Buenos Aires with an unfinished manuscript, Camila (Agustina Muñoz) all but assumes her friend’s spot—not to mention a few dangling relationships—in a literary translation fellowship in New York City. Camila’s choice of text: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, naturally, giving Hermia and Helena license to oscillate between North and South America as if they were different worlds, and to riff on the impermanency of love and self.

by Bill Curran

The story of an irredeemably chaotic, forever ailed pair of siblings—Robert (John Cassavetes), a louche, bestselling (but never working) author and alcoholic, and Sarah (Gena Rowlands), his troubled, manic sister just divorced and now separated from her daughter—Love Streams doesn’t care much for a Story, capital “S”. There is no dissolution or sea change in Cassavetes’ swan song*. If one of the chief pleasures of any good narrative is the suggestion of lives lived before and after the story itself, it’s striking to note that, unlike previous Cassavetes works like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence (with their forever altering moments), Love Streams exists on a continuum. We know Robert and Sarah will never really change. And there is a poignant resignation in realizing at the film’s end, as a thunderstorm pounds the windowpanes of Robert’s home and Sarah’s new companion’s car,...

Please welcome back new contributor Bill Curran for a 10th anniversary look at Miami Vice

The major studio head-scratcher of its year, the ultimate distillation of Michael Mann’s brand of clean sheen noir, and the most authentically auteurist film of the aughts, Miami Vice was the movie offspring of a successful and ever-parodied 80s TV series that was nothing like the original. Instead, Mann unleashed a brooding and voluptuously pixilated peacock of a crime thriller upon an unsuspecting public

If only every recent remake had as much reckless spirit as this one did when it opened nationally ten years ago today. Though the film received favorable notices from top print critics, including a rave from A.O. Scott, the majority of reviewers (and almost all audiences) were simply confused...

In June we're celebrating favorite queer moments in cinema. Here's guest contributor Bill Curran on a pivotal low key scene in Weekend...

Jamie: "What's going on?"

Russell: "Nothing… nothing's going on."

Pride is hard. We’re in a month filled with delirious rainbow floats, umpteen “Yass Queen” gifs, and appropriately lascivious street dancing down many city streets around the globe, and yet I’d like to pause and consider how pride is not merely happiness or acceptance, but respect. And respect is hard.

Respect—one’s own worth in relation to others—is the motoring theme behind much of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011). In this sense, if Weekend can be considered a landmark 21st century film (as indeed it should be, by any number of artistic rubrics), then the pivotal scene is this exchange between Russell (Tom Cullen) and his best (straight) mate Jamie (Jonathan Race). It is the sea...