Since everybody seems to have a Scream story, here's mine:
About a year ago, I was taking a class on horror in cinema. Every time the professor would make reference to some significant film, he'd ask for a show of hands of who'd seen it. Naturally, any reference to some (usually modern) arthouse flick—Midsommar, Guadagnino's (AKA, the good) Suspiria—would be met with a raised hand on my part. Then, as one must expect, he eventually got around to Scream; the…
In 2014, the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, headed by Jane Campion, opted to bestow its annual Jury Prize (third place) upon two notable films: Xavier Dolan's Mommy and Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language. From that point on, the first question most reporters saw fit to ask Dolan in relation to Mommy was something along the lines of "How does it feel to forever have your name immortalized alongside the great Jean-Luc Godard?" Certainly not an unwarranted question, especially…
After all the confusion, wonderment, intrigue and occasional frustration that has come from three films (and one mediocre short), there's really only one conclusion I could reach: absolutely nobody is making movies like Alice Rohrwacher right now. At this point, I've given up trying to describe the sensation that her grimy-yet-whimsical features evoke; that strange tingling of magical realism defies labelling, and that's what makes films like La Chimera so appealing.
With its narrative focus on the unethical unearthing of…
The courtroom is a space for procedure, so it's no wonder the majority of courtroom dramas—even those well-made—tend to blend into a crowd of similarly structured films and hammy awards-bait. There are, of course, those exceptions that prove the rule, and they tend to shine brightest on the festival circuit—the legendary 12 Angry Men won the Golden Bear in Berlin; Alice Diop's dull but undeniably unique Saint Omer picked up second-place at last year's Venice Film Festival; and now, a…
Let this be a lesson to all you self-proclaimed Oscar pundits out there: no matter how airtight the perceived top 5 list for International Feature may be, always expect whichever committee votes on these nominees to throw in at least one curveball to fuck with everybody! This year, I learned that lesson the hard way when perhaps the easiest slam dunk category of the year was upended with the untimely demise of Asghar Farhadi's best movie in almost a decade.…
Every so often, you come across a film with such memorable side characters that your first instinct upon the roll of the credits is "Damn, they really should've made a movie about them, instead!" Henry Selick's long-awaited return to stop-motion, Wendell & Wild, is one such film, and the memorable side characters deserving of their own film are none other than... Wendell and Wild. The choice for Selick and co-writer Jordan Peele (who also voices Wild) to name the film after…
