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…
Underground. Undertaken. Underpinned. Understated. Of these various under words, the one that tends to fit Canadian horror is “understated.” From the halcyon days of “Black Christmas” and the early work of David Cronenberg up to more recent fare including “Blood Quantum” and “Bloodthirsty,” Canada has produced much distinctive work in the genre, often benefiting from…
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…
“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…
“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes” — Macbeth Act 4, Scene 1 Pronouncements telling us that fair is foul, good is bad, and dark is light are what you might expect to hear from the propaganda machine of an ambitious politician or a news organization seeking to sow confusion. In…
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” — Henri Bergson Some people experience maturity at an early age when they are thrust by circumstances into a position of responsibility before they are ready. Some do not experience it until their twenties, thirties, or…
If your children suggest that you operate within “your zone of resiliency,” you might want to look into what soap opera they’ve been watching, or whether they have gotten their hands on a convoluted movie script, the sort readily available in Mike Mills (“20th Century Women”) C’mon C’mon, a film inspired by Mills’ relationship with…
