neo-nazism
Becky is an entertaining thrill ride but runs into trouble with its weak script and mediocre direction.
Skin manages a few gripping moments thanks to its cast but can’t string them together into something meaningful.
Diane Kruger carries In the Fade on her leather-clad shoulders and ensures that you’ll walk away from the film feeling absolutely rattled.
As a director, Atom Egoyan has increasingly shifted away from the emotionally raw content of his beloved 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter in favour of seedier, pulpier material that film suggested he had emotionally matured away from. Egoyan’s love of trash cinema informed his earlier work, but after showcasing his potential to make a drama film divorced of genre pretensions, the fact he is still preoccupied with putting an unwarranted arthouse inflection on such material feels like wasted potential. How to make trash cinema out of human tragedy without being offensive He manages to attract the attention of A-list casts and find his way back into the official selection of the Cannes official selection with most releases, purely on the strength of his earlier work, not out of a desire to honour his current sub-De Palma mindset.
Director Jeremy Saulnier’s debut film Blue Ruin marked him out as a director to watch, a spiritual heir to the throne of the Coen Brothers at their most violent. Like the Coens in their bloodthirsty prime, Saulnier filled Blue Ruin with borderline absurdist humour and fully fleshed out characters who would appear as nothing more than walking quirks were they not so perfectly realised. Most importantly, he achieved something that few other Coen imitators manage – he perfectly understood that the violence in their movies takes place in a moral universe, where no evil deed goes unpunished.