The trick in making a film where the outcome is well known is to make what leads up to that outcome as suspenseful as a surprise ending would have been. PRESSURE is a sterling example of how that is done. Based on a true story, it is a lesser-known story of D-Day in which we… Read More »
THE CROW
The word that best describes THE CROW is moribund. Even during the ecstatic orgy of bloodletting that caps this reboot of Alex Proyas’ 1994 film, it is somnambulant as it goes through its paces charting the lengths to which true love can push a young man when faced with the devil. Or his charming associate… Read More »
BACK TO BLACK
Any success enjoyed by the Amy Winehouse biopic, BACK TO BLACK, rests squarely on the frail shoulders of the actress playing the singer, Marisa Abela. With an outsized presence like Winehouse herself, Abela channels Winehouse’s violence and vulnerability, making her at once a lost little girl and a musical powerhouse who refused to be pigeonholed… Read More »
WICKED LITTLE LETTERS
Social change has come to 1920s Littlehampton in the person of Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a foul-mouthed pub-roisterer of an Irish immigrant to this sleepy little English town. More specifically, her unconventional choices, including raising her daughter on her own and living with a man (Malachi Kirby) to whom she is not married, predictably raise… Read More »
ANATOMY OF A FALL (Anatomie d’une chute)
ANATOMY OF A FALL asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of truth. How the reality that each of us inhabits that may be diametrically different from the one inhabited by the people closest to us. Such is the nature of perception, and the unconscious biases that we all carry that persistently assert themselves despite our… Read More »
SATURN BOWLING (Bowling Saturne)
SATURN BOWLING is a horror film as cold-blooded as the serial killer it depicts on a rampage through Calvados, France. And as cold-hearted as the father whose sins are visited in abundance upon two brothers attempting a détente after a lifetime of estrangement. Chillingly observational, and unflinching in its depiction of violence, psychological and physical,… Read More »
INFINITY POOL
With INFINITY POOL Brandon Cronenberg continues his father’s great tradition of unsettling images and quasi-familiar realities. He diverges in that, for all the normalization of the disquieting, in that he fails to evince the same undertone impish glee at the macabre so evident in even the elder Mr. Cronenberg’s darkest works. Still, he… Read More »
INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE (INCROYABLE MAIS VRAI)
One of the many delightful things about Quentin Dupieux’s films is that they do not waste our time. They are a marvel of economy while at the same time seriously introducing a wealth of bemusing ideas in their tightly written, superbly absurd plots. And so it is with INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE (INCROYABLE MAI VRAI), a… Read More »
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
Click here for the flashback interview with David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen for EASTERN PROMISES. With CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, David Cronenberg once again presents us with a dystopian future, or is it an alternate present, that is alien and yet, somehow, instantly familiar. It’s not just the machines that mimic the skeletal structures of… Read More »
SUNDOWN
Potent and deliberately enigmatic, Michel Franco’ SUNDOWN doesn’t so much tell a story as put a mirror up to its audience. With a central character that never explains, only exists with his own imperturbable agenda, it is for us to project our own ideas onto him as we sort out the mysteries of his actions… Read More »
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