Imagine if Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Darren Aronofsky and Gaspar Noe collaborated on a film. If they did, it might look something like Coralie Fargeat’s extraordinary The Substance, a film that blends multiple elements both familiar and innovative into something truly unique and utterly unforgettable. To unpack the (inevitably) reductive comparison, The Substance features spaces…
The great thing about genre is that it offers fans straightforward and familiar material, but it also allows filmmakers the space to come up with new interpretations within established formulae. This is especially true of horror, and the challenge for the filmmaker is to offer scares within the blend of familiarity and innovation. Bishal Dutta’s…
The good news about the film Condor’s Nest, an international revenge thriller set in 1950s Latin America that features a surviving WWII American airman Will Spalding (Jacob Keohane, “Halloween Kills”) in search of a sadistic SS Colonel (Arnold Vosloo, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”), is that it conforms to a three-act structure. This is…
“Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back, No more, no more, no more, no more. Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back no more” — Percy Mayfield A road trip that builds on Abbas Kiarostami’s “A Taste of Cherry” and Jafar Panahi’s “Taxi,” Jafar’s son Panah has built on his father’s…
“Life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved” — Victor Hugo Winner of the Golden Lion Award at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, Audrey Diwan’s (“Losing It”) harrowing abortion drama Happening takes place in rural France during the 1960s, a decade before abortion was legalized in France. Based on the memoir by Annie…
There was a popular book written in the late 1980s by Robert Fulghum named “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” It is filled with tried and true lessons about growing up: “Hold hands and stick together,” “play fair,” “look at yourself,” and other snippets of suggestions we learn about early in…
“You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph” — Neil Gaiman In the opening of the film, The Power of the Dog, Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit-McPhee, “Dark Phoenix”), a Montana cattle rancher’s future nephew, whispers in…
