Lady Vengeance: 2011 New York Asian Film Festival

Running for nine solid years and organized by the folks over at Subway Cinema, the New York Asian Film Festival is a genre lover’s dream — a carefully curated crop of new films from Korea, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, and anywhere else on the continent they can get their hands on a good movie, watched in the company of equally discerning fans. The 2011 edition is kicking off on July 1 with the film Milocrorze: A Love Story, a genre-bending samurai romance in the form of a musical variety show, from Yoshimasa Ishibashi. I’m intrigued already. I remember the first time…  Read more

Lady Vengeance: Trollhunter Review

Any genre fan will tell you that when it comes to movie beasties, delayed gratification is key. It is considered classic good form to mount anticipation via quick glimpses of scales/fur/claws, or unnerving detritus left in the creature’s wake, all leading up to the spectacular fashion in which the monster will finally emerge. Rather than bend completely to convention, Trollhunter, with dry Scandinavian aplomb, breaks with this rule of horror suspense by having the grizzled titular character run out of the woods, shout “TROLL,” and cause his disbelieving companions to disperse chaotically amid earth-quaking snorts and stomps. The troll isn’t…  Read more

Lady Vengeance: Poster? I Don’t Even Know Her

In an impressive show of state pride and clever programming, the Alamo Drafthouse, the much-lauded Austin-based movie theater chain run by the same folks behind nerd art and t-shirt purveyor Mondo and annual genre film festival Fantastic Fest, is doing a roving summer screening series called The Rolling Road Show. Each of its ten lovely Texas cult classic films, from The Searchers to Bonnie and Clyde to Blood Simple, will be shown outdoors in a town related to the film. To promote the series, the Drafthouse worked with artist Jason Munn to create new, graphically minimalist posters for these films,…  Read more

Today on the site we introduce Farihah Zaman’s new column devoted to genre cinema, “Lady Vengeance.” I’ve long wanted a place on this site dedicated to genre cinema and was happy when Farihah proposed tackling it. Some of you will know her byline from columns and articles posted at Reverse Shot and The Huffington Post. Here at Filmmaker she’ll be appearing every Friday covering genre films of all stripes and sizes, from the mega-blockbusters to the indie, micro and foreign-language titles that contain much of science fiction, fantasy and horror’s new energy. Her piece today, “Revenge of the Nerds,” is…  Read more

Lady Vengeance: Summer Box Office’s Revenge of the Nerds

Summer is a strange and wonderful time when many of the rules of regular conduct cease to apply, and this pertains not just to the frequency of ice cream consumption and the blessing of “summer Fridays.” Many people have an image of how genre films are usually consumed – by dedicated genre fans, in a quirky downtown arthouse theater, perhaps, or via DVDs shipped from Hong Kong while alone on the couch wearing a snuggie — but in the summer, the entire country seems to develop a taste for blood or kung fu. Independent genre features continue to be released,…  Read more