DOLLY BACK

Another year, another list! Dolly Back looks back on one of the most remarkable years in recent film exhibition. In a year marked by rare crossover appeal, audience rejection of tentpole films, important conversations regarding labour, and film projection on a glorious scale, your hosts dive into the films that powered their imaginations! Please enjoy another massive (and please make use of our ti...

Was the introduction of sound to cinema a crime? If so, Fritz Lang commits in the first-degree in his seminal thriller/drama M! Crossing paths with the radio medium and the crumbling Weimar Republic, M's soundscape is rich with texture and subtle connotation, though what strikes your hosts the most is Lang's deployment of silence. Join them as they hunt for an answer in the midst of Germ...

It's been a long, winding journey for Dolly Back to arrive at David Robert Mitchell's Los Angeles, putting their cinematic sleuthing skills to the ultimate test. In a film rife with prospective black boxes, hidden bunkers, secret treasures, your hosts contemplate the nature of structuring mystery in film narrative, making sense of Sam's journey into the Angeleno underworld as so man...

At the tail-end of October and beginning of November, Dolly Back could not find a better opportunity to spotlight this middle child of wintery weather. Bob Clark's 1974 slasher is near and dear to the hearts of Torontonian horror lovers, and a striking standard for all of its ilk yet to arrive. Offering a strikingly progressive perspective compared to the misogyny of its successors, your host...

Dolly Back is sick with excitement at presenting its latest episode on Bong Joon-Ho's The Hos t (2006). Perhaps the most eminently celebrated South Korean director of his generation, Bong is at his pulpiest and most elemental in this monster movie, directly challenging American intervention in Korean affairs with a riff on the real-life dumping of formaldehyde into the Han River. Monsters wea...

GROOVY ! Dolly Back couldn't be happier to tackle Sam Raimi's love letter to the horror genre, the Evil Dead franchise! The rare film trilogy that can elicit both intense laughter and abject terror within the same scene, is equal parts George Romero and Jacques Lacan, has curiously insisted upon the structure of its first film for its "re-quel". In celebration of one of genre f...

The beginning of Terence Malick's feature filmmaking career begins with neither a bang nor a whimper - but the ambivalent hum of 60s American suburbia. As real-world crime and Hollywood myths of the era coalesce, the filmmaker embarks upon an odyssey through a country in desperate search of new icons, spanning the bygone Western past of the nation with the  schoolyard romances of the day. Mar...

William Friedkin lays it all on the line in this 1977 thriller, shaking his fist at the sky and the precarious times of an increasingly globalized and tragically nuclear world. Assembling a ragtag group of all nationalities on every level of production, the odyssey of four damned workers journeying to a pillar of flame with even more nitroglycerin stands as one of the tensest narratives put to fil...

Few filmmakers handle liminal spaces so casually and comfortably as Jia Zhangke... To the point where you could say he has a sort of home court advantage. Join your hosts this week as they explore the muddy digital textures, surreal animation, and concrete simulacra of Zhangke's THE WORLD. Amid the artifice of Beijing's World Park, we discover how Zhangke's various romances and trag...

Now it’s his turn - Abel Ferrara blazes onto the streets of New York with this gothic and visceral crime epic! Aiming to offer a more precise look at the cultural fabric of NYC while reflecting upon a post-Reagan America, the film is host to explosive performances from Christopher Walken, Laurence Fishbourne, and David Caruso, each manically reaching for some ephemeral goal. Join your hosts as the...

In a move of unappreciated genius a decade ago, Sofia Coppola swiftly turned her viewfinder to the beginning of the social media age and the unwitting victims falling into its web. In a period piece 3 years removed from its real-life events, The Bling Ring is an all-too voyeuristic and charming encapsulation of how rapidly our culture processes and produces information, everywhere from the styles...

How would you describe home? Your answer can stem anywhere from a simple one-word response to describing an experience beyond words. Marjane Satrapi's imaginative and harrowing Persepolis (2007) runs across this spectrum in one of the most distinct autobiographical accounts of the century. A chronicle that covers the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the Iran-Iraq War, and Satrapi's life story...

In the shadow of Y2K, a new champion has risen - John Singleton's 2 Fast 2 Furious stands as the long-running franchises most streamlined and personal chapters! One of two films not to include Vin Diesel, the Californian native recruits Paul Walker and Tyrese Gibson on a Miami Vice whirlwind, laying the groundwork for Fast's connection to contemporary hip hop, vigilantism, and high tech...

Armed with the shadows of post-war America and perhaps its greatest star in Humphrey Bogart, director Nicholas Ray chronicles the unraveling of "movie magic" and romance in his 1950 tour-de-force! It may not join the ranks of the polychromous widescreen tragedies he carved his name in cinema history with, but its aesthetic calling cards only serve to strengthen its exploration of the mal...

New York is about to explode! Sidney Lumet's tense filmmaking spills onto the streets as the century's most pivotal confrontations with American authority are still in the rearview mirror. Making the most of its real-life subject material, the documentary-like approach to tracking Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik and his every move makes for one of the most thrilling and *sweatiest* heist...

Conjuring synthetic sound and Faustian fury, Brian De Palma's adaptation PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is one of cinema's most striking keystones, both as a cult object as well as an inspirational force of nature. As William Finley's Winslow Leach's appearance and creative sincerity are contorted into Expressionist angles by Paul Williams' Swan, their battle illustrates the reca...

Dolly Back learns to live with Godzilla, as they take on Hideaki Anno's striking SHIN GODZILLA , equal parts brilliant political drama and show-stopping kaiju film! An excellent case study in where American and Japanese filmmakers and audiences diverge in their evaluation of a global icon, this outing boasts perhaps the most existentially terrifying creature design of the decade, and some of...

Silence speaks volumes - a principle that Chantal Akerman exercises to the fullest in her profoundly lonely and austere masterclass, LES RENDEZ-VOUS D'ANNA ! As a filmmaker promotes her film across the European continent, her fleeting conversations become quiet ambushes on finding home and hearth. Often tuned out by her conversational partners, Anna is also trapped by the film's immacula...

Call us, listener. Dolly Back feels positively electric about finally visiting the world of David Lynch, in his 1997 neo-noir  Lost Highway ! A product of pure, postmodern pulp, it also samples as a brilliant encapsulation of the end of the 20th century, where digital continues to intercede between spectators and their perception of reality, Americana undergoes a tragic metamorphosis, and time is...

SOOOOMEBODY PLEASE… GET THIS MAN… A GUN! In what will certainly go down as one of the alltime great action franchises, your hosts track the impossible rise and delightful highs of the John Wick franchise, dialing in especially to Chapter 2. An entry which catapults the underworld mythology and tragic qualities of its humble predecessor, Chad Stahelski points his viewfinder at the proverbial action...

Starting off their second season, Dolly Back wrestles with a filmic friendship that couldn’t be further from their own partnership, yet profoundly truthful in its own right. Elaine May’s 1976 crepuscular drama sees Peter Falk’s Mikey and John Cassavetes’ Nicky darting around the alleys and diners of Philadelphia, quietly in search of that fabled brotherly love. As their bond threatens to unravel i...

Marking one year of releases from yours truly, Dolly Back celebrates by gazing into the sunsetting Western, epitomized by John Ford's incredible The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ! A master who has grown weary of desert plains and gunplay - and making films at all! - leaps back into the saddle to write a eulogy for the mythology he and the medium helped edify in the American consciousness. A l...

The year is 2006 - YouTube still has training wheels on, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are about to throw down, and digital filmmaking is ready to explode! In a year full of exciting experimentation from auteurs such as David Lynch and Michael Mann, directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine are the first to mix all these postmodern moments in an exciting cocktail, and a bonafide VEHICLE for Jason Statham!...

CW: Sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. For every happy wanderer and stranger, there remains a distance. In Mani Ratnam’s 1998 romance/political thriller, Bollywood tropes and the mythology of its star are flipped on their head in service of a harrowing national allegory, questioning how the idealized unions of Indian cinema could lead to reconciliation. In a film that evokes a postmod...

Brotherly love, national values, and home - time has a funny way of sweeping them all away without discrimination. In an act of preserving fire, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 religious drama questions the ethics of returning to the past and bearing silent witness to the future, as collapses reality and surreality, man and woman, sane and insane, mortal and myth into spiritual equilibrium. By blurri...