Brew Views There’s a secularist party going on this weekend at Portland Humanist Film Festival, which includes a costume-contest screening
   More

Brew Views Since Hollywood is forever bent on remaking its thrillers with more gore and less brains—the hee-haw replica of Straw Dogs is merely the latest example—we might as well get in on the ground floor.   More

Brew Views Twin girls hacked to pieces. Torrents of blood spilling from an elevator. Shelley Duvall. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is full of creepy imagery. But it’s the film’s family dynamic that’s the   More

Brew Views Horror is driven by imitation, and there was no better rip-off artist than Lucio Fulci. The Italian schlock-shock maestro built a career nibbling from other, better movies. But perennial favorite Zo   More

Brew Views Shaun of the Dead has infected so many imitators in seven years that the mention of Edgar Wright’s genre-bender almost summons a reflexive twinge of dislike. I’m actually pretty bored by the zo   More

Brew Views The knee-jerk response to Sarah Palin: You Betcha! is that the Barracuda from Wasilla has gotten a documentary she richly deserves, though it might be just as true that wanting to make a Sarah Pali   More

Brew Views It tends to confirm one’s more churlish suspicions of the world that Robert Downey Jr. had to don a British accent and a steampunk gimmick to become a hit detective, when he all but perfected the    More

Brew Views The Clinton Street Theater is enthused about Red Scorpion because it marks the launch of its new Flattop Film Series, a program of ’80s demolition salvage. I’m excited about Red Scorpion because    More

Brew Views The musical montage is a disparaged and mostly abandoned trope, and maybe its rarity makes it more powerful—the two films that most affected me this year both worked their magic with it. Drive, w   More

Brew Views How fitting that the titular, big-eyed grub in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial is equipped with restorative powers, since the movie also has the gift of casting its viewers back into childlike, guileless   More