Huh, I haven't done an Oscar Nominations Reaction Entry in six years. I guess I've been better at handling things I can't control.The nominations have led to a little stuff popping back up at theaters - The Descendants and Hugo return to Fenway. A few other things that received nominations show up in town for the first time: Albert Nobbs, which features Glenn Close as the title character, a

ComingSoon.net/SuperHeroHype has learned that Sony Pictures will hold sneak peek events for The Amazing Spider-Man in multiple cities on Monday, February 6th. Displays promoting the events are going up tonight in London ( check out HeyUGuys' pics ), Rio, New York and Los Angeles! The London URL to sign up for the event is at TheUntoldStoryBegins.co.uk and the U.S. one will be going up soon at TheUntoldStoryBegins.com . This is an event you will want to sign up for, as we have been told a few things you can expect that will make it absolutely worth it! We'll have more info on the event as it comes closer, but be sure to sign up ASAP!

Earlier this month, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox was eyeing Chronicle director Josh Trank to take on the Fantastic Four reboot. SuperHeroHype got a chance today to talk to Trank, who told us that's news to him, however. "I know as much as you guys know. I'm totally serious. I know as much as you," he said. "I saw that leak online and I was like, 'Um, okay, I'm trying to finish Chronicle right now.' This is weird. There's nothing to say, 'Chronicle' is exactly the kind of superhero movie that I wanted to make and, going forward, I want to have some original ideas and different things I'm working on." So there's still the possibility that the studio might be interested in having him on board, but they haven't communicated that to him if...

by Nick Schager

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Joe Carnahan's Liam Neeson-vs.-wolf actioner The Grey, this week it's Cornel Wilde's seminal 1966 stranded-man saga The Naked Prey.

No tears, no pity, no mercy—Cornel Wilde imagines a world of desperate violence and frenzied anxiety in The Naked Prey, in the process not simply inventing the “man in the wilderness” cinematic subgenre but, more powerfully, delivering an enduringly caustic vision of life as hard, inflexible, and painful. Working from an apparent true story, director/star Wilde—the dashing leading man who, beginning with this film, became an auteur of idiosyncratic masculine fables—does away with all but the bare necessities for his tale about a safari guide known only as Man (Wilde) leading an arrogant, boozy fat cat (Patrick Mynhardt) through Africa. Encountering a local tribe, Man's employer refuses to pay the minor levy that the locals demand for passage through their land, a mistake which leads to the white interlopers' capture at the hands of a cheetah pelt-adorned chieftain, who in a prolonged sequence tortures his captors and their African employees. Wilde shoots this episode with stunningly stark, nonjudgmental brutality that immediately conveys his work's unsympathetic worldview—images of an African caked in mud and then roasted on a spit, of Mynhardt's European tied belly-down to the ground in front of a cobra slithering about a circle of fire, and of another man chased and stabbed to death by a mob of screaming, cheering women all express the filmmaker's blistering opinion of the wild as a kill-or-be-killed battleground.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Naked Prey (1966)...

Busy at work all week, but do not take the lack of tickets on Saturday for fear of a little snow. Hardy New Englander here.The snow did have a little effect on my Saturday, as there were only two of us at Japanese class instead of the usual five, and I'm guessing it kept a few people from the Chlotrudis Awards nominating meeting, leading to it running short and being practically over by the time

This was going to be paired with something else: At first, Red Tails for both having predominately-black casts or A Dangerous Method, which I saw on the same night. But I really said all I had for them in the TWIT entry(*). Then I figured a "first love" pairing with Young Goethe in Love, but my work schedule made that one tough to catch during its one-week booking (and its not going to happen

Hey, it's been a while since we've seen China Lion open a film in Boston - Love in Space and My Kingdom back in September. Nobody manned up to get 3D Sex & Zen Extreme Ecstacy, and Magic to Win only played a few cities (5 screens instead of the usual 20-ish). It looks like we're going to miss All's Well Ends Well 2012, which is a shame. I don't know that it looks like a particularly good movie

by Vadim Rizov

Come Back, Africa's primary intent is explicitly polemical: to depict apartheid in action and show the world what it was condoning through inaction. After premiering at the 1959 Venice Film Festival, director Lionel Rogosin couldn't find a distributor and opened his own theater in New York* in 1960. By the time the film opened there, the Sharpeville massacre—in which South African police opened fire on a crowd and killed 69 Africans—had taken place, so his message came through amplified.

When evaluating revivals of socially important documents, a standard critical fallback is "flawed but powerful," a grudging assessment inadvertently implying worthy intentions trump bad filmmaking; such caveats don't help anyone and wouldn't get at what makes Come Back, Africa interesting. A few years ago, Film Forum's revival of Rogosin's 1954 On the Bowery unexpectedly drew sell-out crowds eager to soak up his non-judgmental, flavorful portrait of the long-gone bars and bums of Bowery St.; the film's easy flow—everyday homeless tragedy between binge-drinking—is comparatively relaxed alongside Africa's urgency. The opening shots show Johannesburg as a human-free monstrous metropolis: the script specifies "steel girders of new construction indirectly suggesting a crucifixion." The soundtrack is full of shrill whistles and pounding of doors, sounds of work and police persecution that are ambient constants for South Africa's black labor force.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Come Back, Africa...

by Steve Dollar

With his bold visual style and intimate, if volatile, narratives, Gerardo Naranjo has been one of the most exciting independent directors to emerge from Mexico in the decade after filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón put the nation's cinema back on the international radar. While Naranjo, 40, always seemed keenly appreciative of the Godardian dictum, "All you need for a film is a gun and a girl," the phrase has never been more appropriate than for his new movie, Miss Bala. The narcotics thriller jacks up the stakes with pyrotechnics and gun battles in the real-life story of a would-be beauty queen (the sensational Stephanie Sigman) who becomes the pawn of a drug gang. The director shared his thoughts about this dramatic leap in a chat during the 2011 New York Film Festival, where Miss Bala had its American premiere.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Gerardo Naranjo...

Man, if I would have finished this on the bus ride home yesterday, I could have actually said I was caught up with TWIT. Instead, I went and saw not one, but two movies at Kendall Square last night.Still, the plan is going to be to keep up with this in 2012, even if it means some late Sunday nights. For now, I'm closing out 2011 with this busy page:It's kind of amusing to see Monkey Business

by Nick Schager

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of the latest beast-vs.-bloodsucker saga Underworld: Awakening, this week it's León Klimovsky's Spanish monster-mash-up The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman.

Largely unknown stateside except in die-hard horror circles, Paul Naschy was for decades the undisputed maestro of Spanish horror cinema, and few of his many monstrous efforts were ever quite as memorable—or as financially successful—as The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman, aka Werewolf Shadow, one of the leading man's dozen films in which he assumed the role of lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky. A dashing stud tormented by his beastly curse, Daninsky finds himself forced to face off against an evil bloodsucker in León Klimovsky's rollicking B-movie, which—after an intro in which two doctors debate the possibility of Daninsky being a werewolf, while his silver bullet-riddled corpse lies on a stone slab—places its initial focus on fetching blonde Elvira (Gaby Fuchs). With friend Genevieve (Bárbara Capell) by her side, Elvira travels to the French countryside in search of the tomb of Countess Wandesa (Patty Shepard), a vampiric witch killed during the Inquisition about whom Elvira plans to write an article. That journalistic motivation, however, is as quickly disregarded as is any trace of logic or coherence, beginning with her friend Marcel (Andrés Resino) randomly remarking about a forthcoming trip to Istanbul, "I've seen so many James Bond pictures, by now I know all the tricks."

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971)...