mystery
Bleak thrillers that satirize the modern nuclear family seem to be increasing in popularity in recent years. The most prominent example would obviously be Gone Girl, based on Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name and directed by David Fincher. The latest film that could classify within this subgenre is The Girl on the Train, which contains many similar elements to Gone Girl, including a mysterious disappearance of a woman, which the film’s events revolve around.
When the title card appears in Daguerrotype, it announces the film as “Le secret de le chambre noire”. That title reflects the film’s goals as a dark, foreboding ghost mystery, and it probably does so better than the title “Daguerrotype” does. But what I like about the title Daguerrotype (misspelled though it might be), is that it refers to the most interesting part of the film:
In Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, Kris Kelvin (played by Donatas Banionis) journeys to a space station on the sentient planet Solaris in order to investigate whether the planet is still useful for scientific inquiry. Critics at the time considered Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film as the Soviet answer to Stanley Kubrick’s famed 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
When I sat down to watch Observance, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It opened with a rather artsy tone, as waves crashed against rocky cliffs, all in black and white. After a minute or so of this, the film cuts to Tenneal (Stephanie King) walking through the streets on her way home.
The suspense thriller gets a modern makeover in Nerve, which takes on both modern cyber culture and the cult of instant celebrity in a slickly produced, fast-paced crowd-pleaser aimed straight at the audience that’s the most likely to get it. Nerve is self-consciously cool to a fault, but it does know who its target audience is. Nerve is particularly timely in light of the current worldwide furor over Pokémon GO.
2016 is already shaping up to become the year of reboots and sequels; whether or not they are deemed acceptable is a different matter. Now You See Me indeed worked as a solo endeavour back when the magic was introduced three years previous. The existence of the sequel may come as a surprise to some, due to the mixed responses circling the first instalment.
What happens when two performance artists grow up, get married and have kids? Their kids become part of their art, of course. This is the story of Caleb and Camille and their two children whom they affectionately dubbed “Child A” (Annie) and “Child B” (Baxter).
After a brief hiatus with Fast and Furious 7, mainstream horror’s prodigal son James Wan has returned to the Devil’s Church of Jump Scares with a sequel to his paranormal blockbuster, The Conjuring. The main lesson he seems to have learned on his franchise-hopping action excursion is how to make things feel absolutely massive, and in following the golden rule of sequels, he’s applied that bigger-is-better ethos to The Conjuring 2. The ghostbusting duo of the first film – Ed and Lorraine Warren – are called to London to flush out some more housebound demons, but in an effort to raise the stakes over the first film, Lorraine is also faced with her own adversaries:
I love a good documentary, more than that I love a good mystery. While documentaries such as The Wolfpack have great stories, it’s the films that delve into the depths of the truth that really shine through for me. Finding Vivian Maier and Carol Morley’s Dreams Of A Life excel at this.
Despite The Falling Snow is a film by novelist and filmmaker Shamim Sharif. The film is based on her book of the same name and plays out over two time periods. In 1950’s Moscow Katya is a spy for the Americans and is encouraged to marry and steal secrets from the young politician Alex.
Searching For Hell is an international exploration of infernal places around the world, with a loose but entertaining concept of what hell is. In five segments, the audience visits the site of the deepest recorded excavation into the earth in Serbia, the tourist town of Hell, Michigan, a house designed to reconstruct the Buddhist conception of hell according to tenth-century writer Ojoyoshu, the toxic sulphur mines of Indonesia, and the chaotic capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Each vignette has its own style, varying from the carnivalesque to the dialectic to the observational, and the decision to release the documentary online through the Virtual Reality Cinema (VRC) app Cineveo can only add to its dreamlike, haunting quality.
To try and properly describe The World of Kanako is quite a tough feat. So far I have a mix of the youth-filled slaughter of Battle Royale, the rapid-fire non-linear editing of John Boorman’s Point Blank, and the grittiness of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, smashed together in a blood soaked blender and left to sit in the sun. The World of Kanako is a brutal, convoluted and pop-culture infused neo-noir which punctures a bandage-wrapped fist in the face of decency in delivering its twisted story.
There is none righteous, not even one. — Romans 3:10 Film is a memory machine.
The Falling, the first drama feature by critically acclaimed director Carol Morley, went largely unnoticed on its general release. Despite collecting high praise from the critics, and starring Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams in the lead role, The Falling was almost a blink-and-you-miss-it situation. This seems absolutely tragic, as I would have no reservations in rating it as my favourite film of 2015.
You would be right in thinking with a title like this The Boom Boom Girls Of Wrestling would be a lot of fun even if it wasn’t very good. Made by independent filmmaker Carolin Von Petzholdt, The Boom Boom Girls Of Wrestling claims to be inspired by true events (but I’m pretty sure this is just a gimmick), and tells the story of a group of out of work actresses who train to be wrestlers as part of some kind of reality show. However, on their way to their first event in Las Vegas their bus breaks down and they are stranded in a ghost town where a mysterious slasher (dressed as chicken, because, why not?