Observance is a difficult film to figure out, the kind that makes you wonder not what its creators are intentionally hiding from its characters and viewers, but what they have not yet figured out themselves. While it has more than its fair share of beautiful shots, dramatic hard cuts, and impressive performances, how unclear the…
The old adage that employs the sentiment “be kind and respectful to your elders” would certainly apply to the cinematic senior citizens featured in the Top 10 Ominous Oldsters in the Movies. Age many be just a state of mind to many, but underestimating the potential for the combative mature masses in cinema (or society…
Richard Vanuk (Daniel Falicki, “Devils in the Darkness”) is a guy who struggles. He’s struggling to pay his rent and keep his landlord’s thug son off his back. You could say he’s struggling to stay sober, but I think it’s more accurate to say he’s struggling to keep enough alcohol in the house to keep…
In a trailer commentary video that can be viewed on IMDb, Robert Eggers, writer and director of The Witch, explains that what he set out to accomplish with his debut film was to transport twenty-first century viewers back to the seventeenth, to a time when “the real world and the fairy tale world were the…
Every Christmas season, two categories of people emerge from their Thanksgiving comas: Those who identify with Buddy the elf and those who identify with the Grinch or Ebenezer Scrooge. Some start listening to Christmas music before Halloween; some “Bah, humbug!” their way through shopping malls and tree lots. Yet, there’s also the forgotten few who…
In The Hallow, a couple and their infant son move into an old house that borders a mysterious Irish forest thought to be of malevolent disposition. Spoiler alert: It truly is. There are vengeful beings living in those woods, and they’re none to pleased to have the family traipsing about. Adam and Clare Hitchens (Joseph…
How hard it is to look at pure evil right in the eye? It is hard, very hard, mainly because, as Hannah Arendt very lucidly said, it is extremely banal. No apocalyptic Lucifer-like layouts, no tall teleologies or immense intentions; the people who do evil are brutally banal, practically plain — and they are of…
