The horror genre allows many opportunities to explore opposition. The opposition may involve faith in “The Exorcist,” gender in “Rosemary’s Baby,” class in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and sometimes all these and more, such as in “Drag Me To Hell.” With folk horror, the opposition is often between tradition and modernity, insiders and outsiders, new…
An astronomer, obsessed with finding a planet capable of supporting life, hires a dreamy, itinerant artist with no background in science to be his research assistant in the majestic, gorgeous Clara. This is a movie that should appeal to romantics and science wonks alike, and it features strong performances by the two leads, who happen…
Hot on the wicker heels of Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” is Blood Paradise, another chiller about uninitiated Americans travelling to a Swedish rural retreat. This time the victim is horror author Robin Richards (Andréa Winter, also co-writing with co-star and director Patrick von Barkenberg), whose last novel, “Return to Blood Paradise,” was a critical and commercial…
An American couple in Singapore suffers a miscarriage and returns to the United States — but did they bring something with them? Of course they did, in Blood Child, a sublimely awful, soulless affront to respectable supernatural horror tales. I’m not trying to scare off potential viewers here, but if I did, it would be…
Recapturing old memories can be challenging, especially when the line between what really happened and what may have happened is so fragile. Like Joanna Hogg’s recent film memoir, “The Souvenir,” Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo (“Thursday Till Sunday”), in her third feature Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven), is uncertain where memory…
WARNING: This review is very geeky. “Deep Space Nine” is the pariah, or even the “petaQ,” of the “Star Trek” franchise. It is regarded in fandom as a middle child between “The Next Generation” and “Voyager,” and is described by viewers and makers alike as the “darkest” entry of the franchise. More disparagingly, it has…
Cold Blood, by writer-director Frédéric Petitjean, is the assemblage of a lot of good ideas that belong in different movies into one 90-minute feature that couldn’t possibly hope to explore them all properly. What we’re left with is the semblance of movie, the component parts of which are so at odds with each other that…
