celluloid consommé

  Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) goes through a journey to realize just what kind of person he is by the end of the excellent original   Justified  series after 6 more-than satisfying season, although his ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea) tells him early in season one: he is the angriest man she has ever known. This concept burrows deep underneath the goings-on of Givens’s investigation in   Justified: City Primeval , where Raylan this time hunts down a man who may be just as rage-fueled as he. Clement Mansell ( Boyd Holbrook ) finds himself at the business end of the Marshal’s service after he involves himself in the killing of a Detroit judge, Alvin Guy (Keith David), and his assistant Rose Doyle (Rae Gray). After meeting Raylan for the first time in 2010 with the first season of  Justified , we come to expect a kind of behavior from him that sets in motion a change of scenery, or as law enforcement in the TV medium call it, “punishment detail.” This isn’t so far...

Cauldron Films brings Fulci’s second film from his Gates of Hell trilogy to 4K. Box art photo courtesy of MVD Visual. Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy may be famous for housing arguably one of the most atmospheric and influential horror films ever made,  The Beyond.  But so important to the development of it is of course the films made before it, but perhaps not as influential as  City of the Living Dead  was to Fulci’s apex of his classic disturbing, revolting visual style that places us in hopeless landscapes where death lurks close to everyone and everything. Fulci’s viscerally grotesque style can be described as an acquired taste within the horror genre and the films within the loose Gates of Hell trilogy are no exception. But with the first film of said trilogy, and the first title that saw Fulci work with Catriona MacColl (who would appear in each of the three films),  City of the Living Dead  would hit a groove that would keep the director in the realm ...

Mutt  is an accurately stressful snapshot of the life of Feña (Lio Mehiel), a trans man planning to pick his father up from the airport but constantly running into obstacles barring his way. He is determined to reconnect with his father, Pablo (Alejandro Goic) after having a falling out with his mother. But few things are ever so simple for him during this stretch of time, and Feña runs into some curveballs in the hours leading up to his father’s visit. His ex John (Cole Doman) reappears to care for his sick mother, Feña’s 14-year-old sister (MiMi Ryder) skips school to seek help specifically from him, under the radar of their manipulative mother, and to round things out, there’s a problem with getting a car to pick up his father to begin with. Despite taking place over the course of a couple days,  Mutt  very much feels like one very long day from hell. Rather than physical barriers in something like Scorsese’s  After Hours  keeping our main character from achi...

Benny Chan’s 1990 film makes its disc debut in the US, UK, & Canada Box art courtesy of MVD Visual. A film produced by the likes of Johnnie To, Ringo Lam, and Wong Jing, Hong Kong’s top crime filmmakers, might sound like it would feel similar to other titles we’ve seen from Hong Kong’s violent stretch of the 80s. But with a shifting landscape in the portrayal of Hong Kong in film particularly through the lens of crime, filmmakers began to push the sub-genre’s boundaries to encompass more pathos and conflict within the tough exterior of a gangland hero with the power of the triads at his command. Benny Chan is one of these filmmakers, and as a fairly new director the expectations of crime films from the region were already changing but his collaborative work on  A Moment of Romance  helped solidify the movement’s trajectory into something more personal than a genre picture; Chan helps drive the Hong Kong crime film into meditations on love and personal struggle while making...