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For no apparent reason, at the start of Rubber (2010), perhaps Quentin Dupieux’s best-known film, a sheriff pops out of a car trunk, approaches the camera, and launches into a monologue questioning certain nonsensical happenings in movies.
Birthed during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta's 1979 feature Arrebato erupts like a massive discharge of so much repressed anxiety and despair.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
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BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
READ MORE >
BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
High-concept, no-frills horror is writer-director-editor-composer Andy Mitton’s modus operandi. While his four features (the first two co-directed with Jesse Holland) address vaster subjects of death and the afterlife, there’s also a recognition that dread lurks in the most mundane places.
BY LAURA KERN | December 5, 2022
Bones and All—Luca Guadagnino’s latest monument to ill-fated love, based on the 2016 young-adult novel by Camille DeAngelis—begins with a slice of the quotidian: somewhere in small-town Virginia, a roomful of teenage...
BY KELLI WESTON | November 23, 2022
The opening image of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is arresting, enigmatic, exquisite, revealing an enormous capsized ship, long abandoned, surrendered to a second life as...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | June 7, 2022
Over 20 years ago I made an agreement with Darren Aronofsky to never write about his work. It was the very end of the last century, in a charming fishing village in eastern Mexico, where a group of his closest friends...
BY LAURA KERN | June 7, 2022
“You can lose everything else, but you can’t lose your talent,” proclaims “Baby” Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), a former child star plotting a doomed comeback. Robert Aldrich’s 1962 “Grande Dame Guignol” masterpiece What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was hardly the first film to employ the services of A-list actors...
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2021
Consider Titane a reverse-slasher: not merely because in place of the usual murderous man-child in gender distress, fueled by psychosexual rage to terrorize mainly (or most enthusiastically) his female victims, we have a gender-bending woman serial killer, primarily attracted to automobiles...
BY KELLI WESTON | October 31, 2021