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…
If you’re looking for a weed-centric horror film that will make the chillest of pastimes scary, Ariel Vida’s Trim Season may fill your need. After a mysterious murder/suicide leaves a pot plantation without trimmers, five young, down-on-their-luck people are invited to the rural forests of Northern California to work at, what turns out to be,…
If the title of the film Naked Singularity piques your interest, a brief investigation via your favorite search engine will reveal that it’s a term used in astrophysics to describe a theoretical phenomenon that may exist in black holes. But since this is a film review and not an entry for a layperson’s guide to…
Within the current world of digitally-released cinema, it can be easy to discover what are the treasures versus the trash. And somehow, within the span of only two minutes into Lionsgate’s latest production, Vanquish, I knew what I was looking at was easily the second category — the 2021 equivalent of discovering a mangled DVD…
Edoardo Ponti (“Coming & Going”) has provided his mother, the great Sophia Loren (“Nine”), with her ninety-eighth film credit and her first starring role in 16 years in The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé), a sincere if somewhat flawed look at the relationship between an orphaned Muslim boy from Senegal and an aging…
Beggars can’t be choosers during the global lock-down. Cinemas are closed, blockbuster movies and their smaller brethren delayed, and Netflix’s back catalogue has been squeezed drier than a tube of antibacterial hand gel. So when the streaming platform serves up a new release, written and produced by the all-conquering Russo brothers no less, audiences were…
With one co-directing credit under his belt (“Smoke Filled Lungs”), writer/director Jason Cabell begins his sophomore film with a surprising amount of confidence. Leading with intriguing, juxtaposing images of torture and partying aided by a smooth soundtrack-driven flow, the opening scene of his first solo-directed feature Running with the Devil teases a style generally uncommon…
