A Dry White Season Is, Tragically, Still An All Too Relevant Feature

Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland) thought he had his life in South Africa figured out. In his eyes, everything was as it should be, every person in society was living in their proper place. After all, he didn't suffer in his day-to-day life. Therefore, nobody, least of all his gardener Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), could be suffering around him. Of course, du Toit carried this perception while working as a schoolteacher in a school for white children only. The horrors of a racist society were staring him in the face every day yet he failed to see these injustices. However, Ben du Toit's entire cozy worldview is shattered when Nbubene goes to investigate the sudden disappearance and death of his son.

Filmmaking Gone Awry Proves To Be Captivating In Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau

It's a common occurrence in the modern blockbuster landscape to hear stories of a director originally set to helm a splashy high-budget project get taken off the project during pre-production, reshoots or even principal photography due to that age-old excuse of "creative differences". Josh Trank on Fant4stic, Phil Lord & Chris Miller on Solo: A Star Wars Story, Stephen Gaghan on that upcoming Dolittle movie, oh, the list goes on and on. But few of these departures were as chaotic as when Richard Stanley was fired a few days into filming on his passion project, a feature film adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. What led to Stanley taking this gig in the first place, his firing and the fallout of this decision is chronicled in the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau.

The Godfather Doesn't Just Live Up To 45 Years Worth Of Hype, It Exceeds It

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #37
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #21 (Tied with L'Avventura and Contempt)   

In 1979, director Francis Ford Coppola would unleash a realistic drama called Apocalypse Now that emphasized the realistic emotional and mental turmoil experienced by soldiers dropped into Vietnam. Coppola dove right into a war that had grown bigger than any human being could imagine and dared to imagine what it must be like to live, to breathe, to exist in the midst of all that carnage. Seven years prior, this same guy was responsible for a minuscule indie you may have heard of entitled The Godfather that applied the same thought process of pondering what it's really like to live a life of pervasive violence to the world of mobsters.

Neither Bird Nor Plane, Superman Is Just An Insanely Charming Movie

Us superhero movie geeks owe more than a bit to 1978's Richard Donner feature film Superman. Prior to this movie, superheroes had been relegated to forgotten TV movies, serials, a handful of Zorro movies and a single theatrical movie based on the 1960's Adam West Batman TV show. Though it would take another decade (with Tim Burton's Batman) before another non-Superman superhero movie would find similar success, this iteration of Superman had opened the door for other costumed characters to enter multiplexes across the world and tell their heroic tales in a larger-than-life visual medium.

The End Is Nigh In The Engrossing Apocalypse Now

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #9
Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #14

Every single war in human history is a brutal affair from which no participant in it comes away unscathed. But the Vietnam War took on a whole other life of its own that made it a particularly gruesome affair. New innovations in cameras and TV news allowed people to see grisly first-hand footage directly from the battlefield, once that footage was actually allowed to be aired on TV that is. People were getting an up-close glimpse at the harshness of war for the first time and the fact that the Vietnam war ended in a loss for America only added a further layer of tragedy to what was already a cataclysmic affair.