Original Cinemaniac

Movie Reviews by Dennis Dermody

Sirat

            Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe’s nerve-shredding, trippy, nightmarish odyssey begins with a wall of weathered speakers being assembled in a gully surrounded by mountains in the barren Moroccan desert. Soon a wall…
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Peter Hujar’s Day

            Ira Sachs’ sublime new film is based on a tape recording that writer Linda Rosenkrantz made of her good friend photographer Peter Hujar, recounting his past day. It was in 1974 and the project of hers was never finished but…
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Three/Three…Extremes

            Out on Blu-ray from Arrow Releasing is a delightfully deranged 2-disc set of two separate trilogies of terror, with short films by well-known Asian directors. Like most omnibus horror-themed collections the entries are hit and miss. But in the second…
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Quatermass II

            One of the best presents I’ve gotten recently was Quatermass II, a staggering box set from British Hammer Studios (famous for bring blood and heaving breasts into cinemas in the late 60s, not to mention the Christopher Lee Dracula movies…
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Shaw-Shock

            Three deranged Asian supernatural-themed excesses from the golden days of Shaw Brothers cinema are unleashed in an impressive box set from Imprint.              Founded by the wealthy Shanghai textile factory owner Run Run Shaw with his male siblings, Shaw Brothers became…
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