Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is the film that carved up cinema conventions and left the audience bleeding in the shower. It shocked, scandalized, and changed the way people looked at thrillers, not to mention their bathroom curtains. Over sixty years later, it remains both a masterpiece of suspense and a masterclass in breaking all the rules.
Tag: drama
Osamu Tezuka’s Animerama Trilogy: Sex, Psychedelia, and the Soul of Animation.
Best known for Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka also helped create one of animation’s boldest experiments: the Animerama Trilogy. Comprising A Thousand and One Nights, Cleopatra, and Belladonna of Sadness, these films pushed the boundaries of adult animation with sex, surrealism, and social critique. This essay explores their evolution and legacy.
The Seventh Victim (1943) – Review
Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim is one of those films that has all the ingredients for greatness, an eerie premise, shadow-drenched cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, and a mystery steeped in paranoia, yet somehow manages to feel oddly inert. At just 71 minutes, it should move like a sharp little shocker, but instead it wanders, circling…
Duel (1971) – Review
Before Jaws, before Jurassic Park, before Spielberg was the patron saint of summer blockbusters, he made a film that proved you don’t need a giant shark or prehistoric monsters to terrify an audience, all you need is a faceless truck, a stretch of desert highway, and the nerve to keep the camera rolling as it…
Belladonna of Sadness (1973) – Review
To call Belladonna of Sadness a “movie” feels like calling a cathedral a “building.” It’s a hallucination stretched across 93 minutes. It’s what happens when you paint a nightmare in watercolours and then set it on fire. And yet, despite its hypnotic beauty, this is not an easy watch, nor should it be. At its…