As video equipment became more available to consumers throughout the 1970s, more and more films were being made independently by up and coming directors and producers. There was a surge in this decade of low budget horror films with more gore than ever before. Maestros of the genre like Herschell Gordon Lewis were able to…
Growing up on the internet, there is both a comfort and a lurking threat. There is that comfort of finding someone who will listen there, that wealth of information, and seeing a likemindedness in traits you can’t always put into words. Then there’s this threat. It’s got a bitter metallic taste, a seedier underbelly of…
What I have had to relearn about the 1960s as a decade in American politics has been infinite. I was taught the usual schtick in elementary school – Dr. King good, violence bad. In high school I remember reading Malcolm X’s essay “Learning to Read.” Thinking about it all these years later I should have…
Invoking the name Cronenberg is an immediate, unfailing method to conjure up mental images of grotesque body horror occurring at the intersection of sex, violence and technology. In this respect, Brandon Cronenberg was always going to find it difficult to escape the shade cast by his father’s long shadow. If Possessor is any indication, however,…
Fourteen years after his last appearance and Sacha Baron Cohen’s announcement that the character would be retired, Borat Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan’s most famous resident, has returned in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. We already knew from the first film that Borat couldn’t understand the meaning of the word “retired” so perhaps it should come as no shock that…
Biopics, biopics, biopics… always present, but rarely experimenting with a tried-and-true form, the genre tends to fall into dry tropes, and a desire to encompass the entire life of a noble (or on occasions, not so noble) figure. Zaida Bergroth’s Tove is just as much a delight as its namesake’s cartoons, and breaks the mold…
Lucy wants to end things. No, not life, but this car ride. The snow beats down on the windshield, and it’s cold, so cold, and everything just feels wrong. The fastest way out of the passenger seat is to end it, to break it off, but too soon, and it’s stranded in the snow. So…
Fugitive Dreams is less about running from the law, as at a certain point the law no longer cares when it doesn’t touch the societal ideal it tries to enforce. Drifters run from pasts that haunt them, dreams coming in the day just as clear as in the night. Shot like a prestige European war…
Shirley strays nearly completely from its source material and perhaps that is its strength as the film takes an alternative look at domestic dynamics. Shirley surrounds the lives of the famed writer Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss) and her husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), who is a renowned and established folklore professor, as they take in…
Small-town thrillers are mostly dominated by strong and complicated male characters. Even when there are female leads, the male characters will always remain integral to the story. But in the talented hands of the first-time writers/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, that is not the case. They brilliantly reinvent the genre by telling the…
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