(WARNING! The following article contains many spoilers for the film ‘Hereditary’ Consider this your first and last warning!) A generational curse bleeds through Hereditary, Ari Aster’s feature length debut, and candidate for most unsettling film of 2018. When Annie’s (Toni Collette) mother dies, horrific events begin plaguing the family, and as Annie seeks a
The filmography of Scottish director Lynne Ramsay would suggest that she has an attraction to dark subject matter. If there is a thread that ties her work together, it’s her sensitivity when dealing with ‘troubled’ characters, an impulse to look past their actions and explore the beneath. She is less concerned with plot and more
The year is 2037. A pair of weary, ragged travellers enter a low-ceilinged supermarket. One has an unkempt beard that falls down to his naval. Everyone calls him Greybeard. His friend is unceremoniously known as Steve. The few working florescent light tubes hang precariously from cables, forming menacingly-looking shadows. The two drifters venture further in.
Let me start by affirming something: I LOVE a good coming-of-age story. I also LOVE well-written dialogue. And complex female characters. And a score by Jon Brion. And, from what I’ve seen of her on-screen persona, Greta Gerwig, always a joy to watch and seemingly impossible to dislike. Another thing: I don’t normally like to
Guillermo del Toro is man out of time. You can imagine him working comfortably in the Universal backlots in the 1930’s, alongside James Whale, building lofty magnificent sets and packing them with incredible actors; producing heartfelt and beautiful creature features. His best films, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth map fairy-tales to gory Spanish war
A Woman’s Life, directed by Stéphane Brizé, is a film based on the 1883 novel of the same name by Guy de Maupassant. It spans the adult life of an upper-class French woman, Jeanne, from returning from school-age to becoming a grandparent. This film has been lauded ‘tearing up the rulebook’ compared to the stereotypical
The American Independent scene is a far-cry from the soaring heights of the early 90’s, and the strong resurgence of the mid-noughties. It has been some time since we had a Dazed and Confused, or even a Napoleon Dynamite. It’s now mostly a landscape littered with political liberal pieces that – in their desperate attempts
So the screener for ‘The Unseen,’ landed at my desk. It’s a tale about a family who lose their only child in a tragic accident and are plagued by the trauma and depression that would certainly accompany any such incident. The trauma is so severe that it starts causing temporary blindness for the mother Gemma
Félicité is many things. On the one hand, it’s a story about female power. On the other, it’s a love story, although not overtly so. You could also go and watch this film and enjoy it solely for the musical performances, which are exquisite. Félicité has a transcendent quality, the kind of film that resists easy
In the sci-fi movie ‘Singularity,’ John Cusack plays visionary CEO Elias van Dorne, who brings sentient artificial life upon the world in the year 2020. Popularized by science fiction author Vernor Vinge, the Singularity is a theoretical point in future history when artificial intelligence exceeds the power of the human mind, becomes self-aware and dramatically
