Sometimes before you fall in love or at the very beginning of falling in love there are signs and wonders whereby what is coming to pass signals itself to you because something so vast and so powerful could not happen without announcing its presence, its necessity, its inherent factualness. Much of our lives it seems are spent in conditions of obscurity, of might-be, of might-have-been, or was-but-is-gone-now, so when there is a falling-in-love, one that is real love, true love, one which will forever alter you, which will not leave you in the condition it found you in, even if after that fact it falls away, it becomes part of the architecture and ruin of the past which we call…

Like a jazz infused fevered dream, this twisted fairytale shows what happens when Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf turn out to be the same person.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a subversive horror tale in which role reversal makes for an interesting shift in the usual power balance so predominantly present in the genre (or most genres for that matter). The beauty of this monochromatic gem is, however, that it is never on the nose about what it tries to convey.

With a slow burn subtlety it manages to evoke a sense of dread caused by the titular character and in the mean time create a destitute ghost town which feels more like…

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes our modern anxieties about female sexuality and turns them on their head by making the lone girl (the subject of fear) into the predator. But far from making this into the male fear-fantasy you might expect (i.e. women are evil and want to drain our precious bodily fluids) or the opposite puritanical revenge-fantasy you might want (i.e. people are evil so we should drain their precious bodily fluids), it instead gives her agency and offers a complex morality play with no easy answers or safe solutions.

Arash is a kind, naive young man who enjoys driving his fancy car and struggles with his father's addiction to heroin. When he's forced to give…

i. mothers tell their daughters not to go out after dark.

ii. the secret to a vampire is that they are human. they will make you believe that they are more than human. they are otherworldly and beautiful and eerie and strange. but look closely into their eyes. you will see the desperation and the yearning and the hunger.

iii. she is not your metaphor or allegory. she is not imbued with righteous fury but instead with deep sadness. she does not exist in our morality. she's a question mark after a sentence, the haze that rises in a early morning, a flickering street-lamp that dances across your face. she doesn't talk too much. she doesn't need to.

iv. there's…

Those who know me, know that I’ve never been a true fan of the Vampire genre. I liked Interview with a Vampire well enough, but didn’t really love it. The seemingly insatiable appetite that the general public has for the blood suckers continues to mystify me.

A few years ago at TIFF, my vampire loving wife picked Byzantium, director Neil Jordan’s return to the genre 18 years after his genre high point, Interview. I have to say I was mildly intrigued by his take and the relationship of his two female leads. The TIFF before last, another Vampire take .. this time by Jim Jarmusch. Wow, how did he manage to refresh an overexposed genre with such ease? OK, this…

"You don't know the things I've done" A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) dir.  Ana Lily Amirpour 
Bless your eyes and ears with this beautiful neo-noir film that wraps itself in a cocoon of romance, eeriness, and amazing cinematography while still remaining somewhat unknown. Set in an Iranian ghost-city, we see a troubled young man who stumbles upon a murderous but set young woman who is a vampire that preys on her victims in darkness. This film hit everything on the nail. Done completely in B&W, there are countless shots that are just breathtaking (DP Lyle Vincent) and dare i even say iconic or soon to be iconic. Wether it was a song playing in the car, club,…