With LONGLEGS, writer/director Oz Perkins has created an original tale of horror set in the 1990s while staying true to familiar tropes. There’s an unhinged suspect, a series of family slaughters that don’t ring true to a murder/suicide scenario, and a neophyte FBI agent at the center of the case in ways she didn’t see… Read More »
ALL OF US STRANGERS
What is real? Is it the physical world around us that, as Lily Tomlin once put it, is really nothing more than a collective hunch, or is it the emotional world we construct for ourselves from memory, and pain, and hope? Andrew Haigh’s enigmatic meditation of a film, ALL OF US STRANGERS considers just that… Read More »
THE INFERNAL MACHINE
THE INFERNAL MACHINE begins as a spare and tense film driven by Guy Pearce’s measured performance as tormented author Bruce Cogburn. Alas, not even Pearce’s fine work as Cogburn slowly unravels from years of guilt can make up for a script whose third act becomes cryptically obtuse, rather than dynamically charged, before it just goes… Read More »
TWENTY TWENTY-FOUR
You could, if so inclined, sit back and enjoy Richard Mundy’s counterintuitively dynamic film, TWENTY TWENTY- FOUR, merely as an engrossing study of a loner going slowly mad in isolation. As the difference between reality and madness builds to a fever pitch, the mystery of what exactly is happening in Roy’s underground bunker matches the… Read More »
Perry Blackshear, MacLeod Andrews & Evan Dumouchel Insist that THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE
THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE is a first-rate existential horror film, as well as a psychological thriller. I got the same vibe watching it that I had gotten watching PI and BRICK, the maiden efforts of Darren Aronofsky and Rian Johnson respectively. Writer/director Perry Blackshear understands more than just how to create evocative, even sumptuous, visuals, he knows… Read More »
DUCK
DUCK is a bittersweet little film that charts an uneven course between comedy and drama. When it works, it is heartbreaking and heartwarming, when it doesn’t, it’s a shame. It doesn’t fit into any neat category, which might explain its limited theatrical release in 2007, but it’s that very thing that makes it a bright… Read More »
MOON
Duncan Jones’ debut feature, MOON, is a sharp and intelligent consideration of reality itself. An engrossing tale set in the near future on the dark side of our planet’s satellite, it probes the equally dark side of the human condition and in the process does what the best science fiction ought to do, which is… Read More »