United States
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is its unwillingness to pander to its audience. Though people may have been expecting a semi-typical supernatural horror film (complete with jumpscares and excessive gore), what they receive instead is something much more disturbing in its implications. Set in Puritan era New England, The Witch is an atmospherically driven, religion-coated film that is, at times, both beautiful and terrifying.
Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies, I could watch it a hundred times without getting bored. I have watched it in different phases of my life, through various perspectives. Every time I watch it, I learn a new detail that I had not noticed the before.
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.
The old is boring and the new is exciting; right or wrong, that’s just how our brains our wired. So when something is in danger of becoming not just old but extinct, it’s only natural that they would seek to extend their longevity by latching onto something new. We could be witnessing an extinction event for one such aging institution, the daily newspaper.
For a horror sub-genre that is frequently criticised for misogynist overtones, it is surprising how many gothic filmmakers haven’t combined the LGBT themes inherent in horror with the rampant violence of slasher film more frequently before. You’re Killing Me is a horror-comedy that puts the emphasis on the comedic elements, its many detours into slasher film never feeling either shocking or as amusing as the film around them. But it is unique for a film in this sub-genre to remove any subtext about societal fears among gay people in contemporary society and just make a straightforward horror-comedy with no deeper thematic resonance.
Even though he hails from a nation renowned for its take on exploitation cinema, director John Hillcoat has repeatedly proven himself to be far more interested with the archetypes of American genre films. His international breakthrough feature, 2006’s The Proposition, was the perfect marriage of the sensibilities of Ozploitation and the most hard-boiled Westerns; for a country with no major cinema heritage, it suggested Hillcoat was a director who could put his nation firmly on the world cinema map. Instead of continuing this distinctive subversion of genre with his subsequent films, Hillcoat has become increasingly formulaic.
The Coen Brothers have managed to put their own twist on noir, the buddy comedy, crime drama, romantic comedies, westerns, and spy films. They are clearly film historians, so they want to show their love of movies by tackling classic genre films that cannot be sold to modern audiences. How did they manage to do this?
It’s impossible to discuss Lamb without being honest about its premise, so let’s start by ripping off the Band-Aid, shall we? Lamb is about a middle-aged man kidnapping an eleven-year old girl. It’s neither exploitative nor overtly horrifying, but its central relationship is inescapably unsettling.
“I heard once somebody describing Zionism as a person escaping a burning building jumping out of the window and falling on somebody else’s head.” – Orly Noy, Israeli peace activist Colliding Dreams is a historical documentary exploring the history and ideas of Zionism, a nationalist movement of the Jewish community. The documentary examines Zionism in relation to the Jewish-Israeli occupation, a highly politically and religiously charged conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that continues until this day.
There is none righteous, not even one. — Romans 3:10 Film is a memory machine.
Naz and Maalik are not your average lead characters. They are gay, Muslim teenagers living a relatively quiet life in Brooklyn. When they aren’t selling lotto tickets and other cheap items on the street for cash, they are discussing college, their religious beliefs, and their relationship, which they largely avoid defining.
Hollywood and the golden age of film have now all but faded into history, and any glimpse into that world is for that reason a glimpse into history itself. Trumbo is a look at the show business world following the Cold War, when Hollywood started to blacklist people solely due to their political alignments. Starring the very talented Bryan Cranston as the titular character, the film is not only a successful character study and biopic, it is also an engaging and entertaining glimpse at a very dark time in Hollywood’s history.
In June of 2015, the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal in the United States. A prominent subject in the news, almost daily it seems that another celebrity or sports player has come out as gay, bisexual, or transgender; Caitlyn Jenner’s recent transformation being a prime example. Although there are still those that are resistant to it, having an alternate sexual orientation or gender identity is now acceptable in the modern world.
To successfully make a genre hybrid that satisfies the needs of both genres is one of the most difficult accomplishments in modern mainstream cinema – something made even more difficult when the genres being mashed-up together couldn’t be in a sharper contrast. There is no sharp contrast between the elements to The Keeping Room, director Daniel Barber’s attempt at a feminist revision of Sam Peckinpah’s tales of masculinity in crisis in the old West. A Peckinpah homage that pales in comparison to its influence Essentially, The Keeping Room is a hybrid between the classical Western and the home invasion thriller, with fantasias of violence depicted in a gruesome and shockingly heartless way that would have made the old master proud.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discovered I had not lived. — Walden (Henry David Thoreau) Set in the remote wilderness of Montana and South Dakota in the 1820s, director Alejandro Iñárritu’s biographical western, The Revenant, follows fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his remarkable quest of survival and retribution. Having been mauled by a bear and left for dead, Glass must find a strength and resolve to overcome the elements and fight his way back to civilization while attempting to have a cathartic release from his experiences.