Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
With Blindspotting, new director Carlos López Estrada emerged onto the scene with a distinct and fiery voice, delivering a knockout primal scream of a film that laced the power of spoken word into a poignant and brilliantly-acted Oakland gentrification satire. In his sophomore feature Summertime, Estrada has bungled almost everything that worked so well in his first outing, delivering an amateurish variety show that leans much too heavily on disparate young voices within Los Angeles slam poetry community coalescing into a Crash-like ensemble of random interconnectivity. Read More