"There is a little of Sergio Leone and the classic pulp westerns of Elmore Leonard, and as a big drama in a little place it could almost be a Sam Peckinpah version of a swearified Harold Pinter. Later, for obvious reasons, it will look like Brian De Palma’s Carrie. But this movie is just so utterly distinctive, it really could be by no-one else but Tarantino. The inventive, swaggering dialogue is what drives it onward: quintessentially American. (I continue to think that Inglourious Basterds [is] the weakest of Tarantino’s films because he strays away from the American wellspring.) And The Hateful Eight repeats a classic trope from Reservoir Dogs: the idea of being in unbearable pain from a gunshot wound, but still talking, still being a threat. There is a horrible kind of black-comic heroism in continuing to threaten and crack wise while being in the same kind of unbearable agony you are planning to inflict on someone else. 'Thriller' is a generic label which has lost its force. But The Hateful Eight thrills."

Previously:

TARANTINO HAD 'DJANGO' CREATIVES WATCH 'CARRIE'

BASTERDS CLIMAX CHANNELS CARRIE

MUIR LINKS BASTERDS TO SCARFACE & CARRIE

"And it’s got the most amazing camera work in the history of cinema. Not so many movies that really impress when it comes to the camera work. Maybe Brian De Palma’s movies… or 2001. Or, for example, lately, the images of Gravity. But the camera work of this movie is so real. It added to a very violent story of the guy coming out of jail and killing a whole family in order to go back to jail where he felt better, and it’s based on a true story. And it’s got a [unique] voiceover. But the mix of that cruelty, the voiceover and the camera put in positions that you’ve never seen before made me be obsessed with the movie. Now, since three or four months ago, it’s for sale [on DVD here in America]. So if anybody is interested you can go on Amazon.com and buy that movie called Angst."

"THERE'S ONE SEQUENCE IN PARTICULAR THAT FEELS LIKE A DE PALMA SCENE ON STEROIDS"

Last Friday, USA Today's Brian Truitt posted an interview with Todd Strauss-Schulson, the director of the horror-comedy The Final Girls. In one part of the interview, Strauss-Schulson discusses some of the film's influences:

"There’s a little bit of Sam Raimi in there in terms of some of the camera work and there’s color swatches like Dario Argento,” he says. “There’s one sequence in particular that feels like a (Brian) De Palma scene on steroids. It’s like a fun drinking game to go through the movie and see what you can catch.” 

4. Whedon had trouble writing the script for movie sequel Serenity because of the wildly different genres its leading characters, Mal and River, represented.
"Mal is a Western fellow and River is kind of Noir, so how do I reconcile them?" His mentor, film professor Jeanine Basinger, helped him steer through the block with genre-blurring movies like Brian De Palma's The Fury and Nicholas Ray's classic Western Johnny Guitar.

Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice
"There's a lot going on in this modestly scaled movie: It's a meditation on the rickety foundations on which even close friendships can be built, and on the notion of whether or not nature — even with all its soothing sounds and comforting greenery — is really our ally. It's also a teasing admonition that we shouldn't believe everything we see, as well as a stylish, whispery love letter to psychological horror studies like Repulsion, Persona, and possibly Brian De Palma's Sisters."

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, A.V. Club
"In Queen of Earth, writer-director Alex Ross Perry—who does snippy black comedy better than just about anyone else on the current American indie landscape—dials down the humor that has defined his work to this point, and turns up the queasy psychological currents that have always gurgled underneath it. Walking a fine line between pastiche (think early Roman Polanski and Persona-era Ingmar Bergman crossed with the opening scenes of a backwoods grindhouse flick) and bona fide psychodrama, Queen Of Earth works much of the same subject matter—egoism, self-destruction, mutual loathing—as Perry’s earlier films; in fact, it’s not hard to think of it as a companion piece to last year’s superb Listen Up Philip, and not just because the two movies appear to share a fictional universe.

"And yet, there is an innate, affecting strangeness to Queen Of Earth, which is pitched somewhere halfway between actor’s showcase and creepy formal exercise, continually foreshadowing a burst of psychotic violence that never comes...

"Like all of Perry’s prior features, Queen Of Earth was shot on 16mm, though here he and his longtime cinematographer, Sean Price Williams, go for a slightly different, trickier formal palette. Both the director’s little-seen debut, Impolex, and his breakthrough feature, The Color Wheel, climaxed with talky, nearly-10-minute long takes that stuck the audience straight into the characters’ emotional trauma; here, he pulls one together early on, structured as a series of eerily intimate close-ups in which the slowly panning camera draws the viewer into Catherine and Ginny’s characters while establishing the connection (or lack thereof) between them. Brian De Palma-style split diopter shots—in which both foreground and background are in focus, separated by a fuzzy middle—recur, making for an effective visual metaphor for the central relationship."

Matthew Jacobs, Huffington Post
"Told in the vein of the classic genre that Perry describes as 'psychotic-women cinema' -- think Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Brian De Palma's Sisters with a touch of Rosemary's Baby and Woody Allen's Interiors -- Queen of Earth is an eerie look at the claustrophobia that sets in when childhood fixtures become relics."

Also note that for its cover story on Mistress America, the July/August 2015 issue of Film Comment includes an interview with Noah Baumbach conducted by Alex Ross Perry.

In a new interview posted yesterday by Variety's Jon Asp (from the Norwegian Film Festival at Haugesund), Trier is asked how he comes up with ideas. "I like working intuitively," Trier responds, "in what I call dirty formalism, or pop formalism. I jokingly say that our films should be like great albums with different songs. I am a big fan of Nicolas Roeg, Don’t Look Now, which could be very specific conceptual things, but it was a warm formalism, it didn’t alienate you. I’m also a very big fan of Brian De Palma. I believe in the idea of doing a cinematic set piece, like Conrad’s diary, it’s like film in itself, or the car crash sequence with Isabelle, and the association of the son thinking of his mother and the last moments of her death, are whole set pieces, a film within the film. So it’s like an album. You have different songs, hopefully most of them are hits."