Frosty Cabin in the Woods Horror ’THE LODGE’ Preaches the Hell of Child-Rearing

February 4, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alicia Silverstone, Goodnight Mommy, Horror, Jaeden Martell, Jia McHugh, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Richard Armitage, Sergio Casci, Severin Fiala, Sundance, The Lodge, Veronika Franz 2 Comments

Austrian screenwriting and directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala either have terror children or were terror children. They love staging a good the-children-will-be-the-death-of-us yarn, pivoting from a story about two young mischievous twins torturing their mother (who’s recently undergone facially reconstructive surgery and, consequently, her children now refuse to believe is actually their mother) in their celebrated German-language debut Goodnight Mommy to a tale of two young mischievous siblings torturing their soon-to-be stepmother in their English-language horror show The Lodge. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Scattershot ’THE NOWHERE INN’ A Meta-Movie About Celebrity Expectations

February 3, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Annie Clark, Ben Betz, Carrie Brownstone, Dakota Johnson, Reviews, St. Vincent, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

Singer St. Vincent (real name Annie Clark) enlists close friend and filmmaker Carrie Brownstone to make a documentary about her biggest tour yet. The trouble is: she’s incredibly dull off the stage. She does her crunches, snacks on farm-fresh radishes, plays Scrabble. She is no feral rambunctious rockstar. Her Smell this is not. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: ‘RELIC’ and the True Horror of Senility

January 30, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Christian White, Emily Mortimer, Horror, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Erika James, Relic, Reviews, Robyn Nevin, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

Relic, an old-folks-being-creepy offshoot of midnight squirmer, explores the true-to-life horrors of a matriarch’s deteriorating mental state. Dementia is scary enough before you add in family curses, labyrinthine structures, and ghouls under the bed and in her impressive debut, director Natalie Erika James filters her own traumatic experience confronting her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s through the prism of horror cinema, allowing for an emotionally rich and impressively eerie slice of dramatic horror that speaks to real-life terrors. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: ‘POSSESSOR’ Is A Blood-Soaked Murder Inception That Continues The Cronenberg Legacy

January 29, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Andrea Riseborough, Brandon Cronenberg, Christopher Abbott, Horror, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Reviews, Sean Bean, Sundance 2020 3 Comments

The King of Venereal Horror has begat a true Prince of Pain. Brandon Cronenberg, the 40-year old offspring of Baron of Blood David Cronenberg, takes up his pops’ mantle circa the turn of the century, when the elder Cronenberg began to pivot away from visceral science-fiction-tinged horrors (Videodrome) and bodily transformations (The Fly) and towards more dramatic affairs (A Dangerous Method) and electric thrillers (A History of Violence). As one sun sets, another rises and with Possessor, a movie that marries the chilly intersection between technology and humanity and some absolutely spine-tingling visual depictions of bloodshed, the younger Cronenberg has come into his own. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Amusing ‘DOWNHILL’ Remake Assumes American Stance, Lets Comic Giants Ride

January 28, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Downhill, Force Majeure, Jim Rash, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Miranda Otto, Nat Faxon, Reviews, Sundance 2020, Will Ferrell, Zach Woods Leave a comment

A remake of the critically-acclaimed Swedish drama Force Majeure, Downhill is kind of exactly like most American remakes of critically-acclaimed foreign dramas: amusing but unnecessary. A blue-square redo of a double-black-diamond story. With the hard-packed dual casting of Will Ferrell (who’s better here than he’s been in years) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who also produced), the dramedy from The Way Way Back co-writers and directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash borrows the premise and some of the critical breaking points from Ruben Östlund’s film but also finds room for new traumas and dark comedic moments to unfold. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Character-Driven U.K. Horror ‘AMULET’ Takes Time But Packs Punch

January 27, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Alec Secareanu, Amulet, Carla Juri, Horror, Imelda Staunton, Reviews, Romola Garai, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

An atmospheric slow burn that has no qualms really stretching out the burn, the first feature film from director Romola Garai is a deliberately-paced, well-acted and artful horror chamber piece fastened to a real whopper of an ending. Movies live and die by their ending; a great ending can make an otherwise okay movie great and a terrible ending can make an otherwise great movie terrible. This, fortunately, is a case of the former. To Garai’s credit, she absolutely nails the ending, delivering the kind of capstone that makes you go back and reconsider the rest of the film through new eyes and newly discovered context. My mind was racing trying to piece together things as the credits began to roll, certain things not snapping into place until my drive home. (You’ll have to excuse the slower processing power of my brain at the time. It was 2AM after all.) Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Benh Zeitlin’s Gritty Pan Redux ’WENDY’ A Gorgeous Hot Mess

January 27, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Benh Zeitlin, Devin France, Reviews, Sundance 2020, Wendy Leave a comment

Benh Zeitlin joined a very exclusive club of first-time filmmakers in their 20’s to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director when his debut Beasts of the Southern Wild broke out. In the years since earning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an Oscar nod to boot, Zeitlin withdrew from the spotlight, whittling away to rebrand the Peter Pan story with his signature Zeitlinisms. Retelling the James Matthew Barrie fantasy with all the semi-grounded, semi-gritty magical realism that propelled Beasts, Zeitlin paints himself into a bit of a corner, refusing to grow up as a director. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Humanist Spy Thriller ’IRONBARK’ Is On a Mission to Move You

January 26, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Abel Korzeniowski, Angus Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ironbark, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Reviews, Sean Bobbit, Sundance 2020, Tom O'Connor Leave a comment

I’m calling an early shot here: if there’s one movie out of Sundance 2020 that stands a decent shot at a Best Picture nomination almost a year from now, it’s very likely Ironbark. The Cold War espionage thriller takes a classical approach to its telling, leaning into familiar biopic/historical nonfiction tropes, while viewing events through an extremely humanistic lens. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Rebecca Hall Is Next Level Good in the Scariest Ghost Story in Years: ‘THE NIGHT HOUSE’

January 26, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Ben Collins, David Bruckner, Evan Jonigkeit, Horror, Luke Piotrowski, Rebecca Hall, Reviews, Sundance 2020 2 Comments

On darkness, Nietszche offered, “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.” The Night House, an expertly-crafted, terrifying ghost story with a towering lead performance from Rebecca Hall, takes this sentiment to heart. Hall is Beth, a widow hoping to understand her husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) shocking suicide, diving into the dark recesses of his cell phone and discovering more than she bargained for. Glimpsing the abyss beyond, Beth confronts a terrifying, mutually exclusive truth: either ghosts exist or there truly is nothing waiting for us beyond this mortal coil. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Giggly Horror-Comedy ‘SCARE ME’ Finds New Ways to Tell Old Stories

January 25, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Aya Cash, Chris Redd, Josh Ruben, Rebecca Drysdale, Reviews, Scare Me, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

A startlingly original and stripped-down madcap horror-comedy about the terrors of the creative process, Scare Me manages to find a fresh entry point to a well-trodden subgenere by asking, simply: what do we want from horror? What is the draw of scaring ourselves – be it with Joe Hill novels, Ari Aster movies, or Ryan Murphy TV shows – and how is any good horror story crafted? These are the ideas that interest Scare Me, a horror-comedy in the tradition of oral storytelling. The film, which leans more towards comedy than horror, follows two writers and new acquaintances in Fred and Fanny, both eloping from society to far-flung snowy cabins to hack out the next horror story sure to terrify the world. Read More