Years of experience with Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, the reigning post-Bava Italian giallo masters, will give you Stagefright. For Michele Soavi, actor and assistant director to the masters turned first-time director here, this meant conjuring up this 1987 pseudo-slasher as his big come-up. The original title, Deliria, being vastly more apposite, this is less a slasher dressed up in giallo airs than a giallo putting on slasher clothing to sneak into the mainstream so it can uncloak its true self when the moment beckons. Like any good disreputable giallo, Stagefright is a bodacious concoction of performance-art murders choreographed like installation pieces, on one hand, and pure, unbridled instinct and impulse on the other. So while the kills may be judiciously filmed and planned, Soavi never lets anything as trivial as common sense or good taste trounce on his funhouse; his film is orchestrated but never programmatic. Continue reading
Midnight Screaming: Stagefright: Aquarius
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Like a flash of incandescent light that’ll burn your eyebrows off while staring into your soul, Emir Kusturica’s Underground is the film Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful wishes it was. Even more indebted to a theoretically cloying magical realism than Life and yet so disturbed and delectably flaring in its madcap intersection of styles, Underground is a paean to not only human life but cinematic life excavated in the death throes of crisis. Imagine if you will Vittorio De Sica directing Abbott and Costello with a script written by Billy Wilder with Benny Hill on trombone just in case, all of whom were alternately inebriated and cocaine-addled during the production, and the beguiling war-time-as-apocalypse-rave-as-long-cavern-of-the-soul milieu of Underground is at least intimated in your ear. 
Extraordinary Tales
Warcraft is out in theaters this Friday generally doing nothing to save the video game adaptation from the cinematic crypt. In eulogy, here are reviews of four that have come and gone before.
Another year, another ho-hum Lewis Carroll adaptation. Cutting to the chase, here’s a review of the best one. 
Would that the rambunctious punk attitude halfheartedly flaunted by X-Men: Apocalypse in a few of its extremities (hair, costumes) had descended into its major organs as well. A structural makeover, with a rebellious narrative more fascinatingly fractured than the milquetoast clash-of-kings promised here, could have made Apocalypse more than the competent, if bog-standard, throat-clearing exercise it ultimately is. On some level, the film retreats from the structural excess of previous film X-Men: Days of Future Past , where an overlapping, byzantine time labyrinth sometimes got the best of the humans trapped in its machinations. The longer but ultimately leaner (read: simpler) Apocalypse is a little more punk and less Rush this time out, despite the de rigueur world-ending climax that’s more or less accepted by this point in superhero cinema history. But it never attains the snotty, vituperative snarl of the Sex Pistols, the discombobulated comic brio of the Ramones, or the stylistic omnivorous brashness of the Clash; instead, it expends quite a lot of energy wallowing around in a state of blissful neutrality, not accomplishing much but doing an acceptable workaday job arriving at its mostly trivial end-goal. 
Edited for Clarity
The Long Take 