There are two ways that I noticed Goodnight Mommy was trying to unnerve me. First, there’s the image of a thirty-something-year-old woman whose face is wrapped in bandages, which gives her a striking resemblance to The Joker from “The Dark Knight.” Second, there’s this ominous notion that I need to beware all ten-year-old twin boys…
Eli Roth’s bloodbath, The Green Inferno, stars Lorenza Izzo (“Sex Ed”) as Justine, an oblivious college freshman who joins a social activism group constantly rallying on her New York campus. The crusade, led by older student Alejandro (Ariel Levy, “The Stranger”) and his girlfriend Kara (Ignacia Allamand, “Best Worst Friends”), is planning a trip to…
Living in captivity is not so when captivity is everything you know. No cell can be bigger than the one constituting our environment, and when our whole environment consists of a small room, bigger than an average houseroom but smaller than a bachelor apartment, a shedding that has seen your birth and growth, then the…
Denis Villeneuve’s last film, 2013’s “Prisoners,” had everything: Gripping story; beautiful camerawork; and a great performance from Jake Gyllenhaal alongside Hugh Jackson. His follow-up Sicario only has the star-studded cast. Emily Blunt (“Edge of Tomorrow”) plays an FBI agent, Kate Macer, who enlists to join an escalating drug war between the U.S. and Mexico, in…
My friend once told me a story of how he was visiting Las Vegas in the mid-1990s. He said that the person he was with, John, introduced him to a rather sharply-dressed man who told him, “Whatever you want here, just ask for it,” and then walked away. John said, “Do you know who that…
The power of one man can change the world because he can change the communities around him, one by one. But the power of the community can change the man and the world much faster — for better or for worse — because there’s undeniable strength in numbers while the strength of one can sometimes…
In fiction as in life the secret lies in believing too much while knowing too little. This lack of self-awareness, which often translates in a very low awareness of one’s own environment, can be a blessing in such difficult times as the ones we live in. Naiveté is the closest we can get to innocence,…
