On the surface Ari Aster’s Midsommar, is very similar to “Hereditary,” in that it too deals with a grieving protagonist who unwittingly finds herself slipping into the clutches of a murderous cult, but it deviates quite sharply from Aster’s debut feature in two interesting ways: One, it’s clearly a very dark comedy at times, not…
I’m not totally sure if A Vigilante — the feature debut from writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson — is meant to be soaked up as entertainment so much as a reconciliation between movies-as-art and movies-as-therapy. The small-scale story is interested in a single dominating issue, that of domestic violence, though in ways that feels inconsistently intentioned, despite…
Hereditary begins after a 78-year-old woman, Ellen, dies, leaving her daughter Annie (Toni Collette, “Krampus”), teenage grandchildren Peter (Alex Wolff, “Coming Through the Rye”) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro), and their father Steve (Gabriel Byrne, “The 33”) alone in the house they’d shared at the end of her life. That’s one thing made eloquently and devastatingly…
Frank & Lola is a pleasant surprise at the end of the year as Oscar season looms ominously in the distance. If adverse to the dreck that usually goes up for the awards, Matthew Ross’s debut is an enjoyable and dark alternative.
For the sake of curiosity, the only selling point that angsty indie drama One More Time appears to boast is its depiction of Christopher Walken and Amber Heard of all people as father and daughter. That’s an odd pairing right there and while Walken’s shtick is one of the most famous in the business, he’s…
In a trailer commentary video that can be viewed on IMDb, Robert Eggers, writer and director of The Witch, explains that what he set out to accomplish with his debut film was to transport twenty-first century viewers back to the seventeenth, to a time when “the real world and the fairy tale world were the…
A dream-like atmosphere pervades David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a nostalgic tone poem that hints of Terrence Malick with its sweeping vistas and soft voice-overs. Though the title card that opens the film says, “This was in Texas,” there is no delineation of time or place, and it is left to the viewer to…
