Riot Cinema: Great Cinema From The Past Half Century

Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

Possessor (2020), about an assassin who works by taking over the mind and body of someone who can get close to the victim without suspicion, could have sprung from the imagination of David Cronenberg and, like his early films, Possessor is equal parts cerebral and visceral. But this film is the work of the writer-director Brandon Cronenberg, his son. It depicts horrific murders in appalling detail as it relentlessly interrogates the experience of inhabiting a foreign body. [Read more…]

The Lodge

January 16, 2020 By Cvon Leave a Comment

In 2015, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz dropped jaws and blew minds with their harrowing–and at points hilarious–debut narrative feature, Goodnight Mommy. Last year, they offered a fresh taste in terror with a vignette in the folklore-inspired horror anthology, The Field Guide To Evil. Now, this heralded Austrian pair of co-writers/co-directors is back with their much-anticipated English-language debut, The Lodge. And while this psychological thriller has plenty in common with their first film, the vibe is decidedly different. [Read more…]

Parasite

November 8, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

South Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho has been thrilling critics and genre fans since 2006, when he unleashed his rambunctious yet heartbreaking creature-feature The Host. He’s awed us again and again with marvelous movies like the mind-bending murder-mystery Mother, the star-stuffed dystopian drama Snowpiercer, and the whimsical yet brutal fantasy-adventure Okja. By now, when you walk into a Joon-ho movie, you should expect something wildly riveting and wickedly clever. And that’s about all you can predict, because Joon-ho’s stories take audiences down paths twisted and devastating, often just when you think everything might just work out. In this vein, his pitch-black comedy Parasite might his masterpiece. [Read more…]

The Lighthouse

October 18, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

In 2016, production designer turned writer/director Robert Eggers awed critics with his directorial debut, The Witch, a daring horror film set in the 1630s. Now, for his ferociously anticipated follow-up, he and his brother/co-writer Max Eggers have journeyed 200-some years to a rocky and remote island off the New England coast to tell a tale of isolation, envy, intimacy, wrath, and regret with The Lighthouse (2019). [Read more…]

The Nightingale

August 29, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

It’s rare that a press screening comes with a warning. But in the wake of reported walkouts, invites to see Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2019) came with a warning. In red font, critics were alerted that the film would contain “sexual violence towards women, violence towards children, and violence motivated by racism.” Since the film’s Venice premiere last fall, some have criticized Kent for the brutality found in her much-anticipated follow-up to her breakthrough debut The Babadook. However, considering her sophomore effort is a revenge-thriller that explores the sins of colonialism, the brutality is essential to its message. To capture the merciless of this domineering mindset, Kent won’t look away from its violence and depravity. And she won’t let us look away either. [Read more…]

Midsommar

July 3, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

“I wrote this while going through a break-up,” Ari Aster said at the special advance screening of Midsommar (2019). “I’m better now.”

The filmmaker’s darkly humorous confession played well to the crowd at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, where press and select members of the public gathered to see Aster’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his wildly praised debut, Hereditary. As the crowd chuckled at Aster’s softly spoken introduction, a mix of excitement and anxiety hung in the air. With his first film, Aster had offered a scorching exploration of family trauma with a unique brand of horror grounded by an impeccable performance from a riveting leading lady. Basically, Hereditary was so outstanding, how could Midsommar possibly compete? [Read more…]

Birds Of Passage

February 13, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by A.O. Scott

In modern movie terminology, “epic” usually just means long, crowded and grandiose. Birds of Passage (2019), Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s follow-up to their astonishing, hallucinatory, Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent, earns the label in a more honest and rigorous manner. Parts of the story are narrated by a blind singer — a literally Homeric figure — and the story itself upholds Ezra Pound’s definition of the epic as “a poem containing history.” It’s about how the world changes, about how individual actions and the forces of fate work in concert to bring glory and ruin to a hero and his family. [Read more…]

The Golem

February 5, 2019 By Cvon Leave a Comment

CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by Noel Murray

Everything horror writers and filmmakers have stolen from Hebrew mysticism gets stolen right back by the Israeli writer-director team of Yoav and Doron Paz in The Golem (2019). A well-crafted and idiosyncratic supernatural thriller, the film plays like a mix of Frankenstein, The Witch, and some of the Coen brothers’ more explicitly Jewish movies.

[Read more…]

Shadow

November 7, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Reviewed by Glenn Kenny

After the limp 2017 film The Great Wall, the director Zhang Yimou was clearly looking to enact a return to form. With Shadow (2018), Zhang has done more than that: he’s created a martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence. [Read more…]

Border

October 26, 2018 By Cvon 1 Comment

You might think yourself a savvy cinephile. Perhaps you’ve heard that Border (2018) won Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival and is Sweden’s submission for Best Foreign-Language Film for the upcoming Academy Awards. So you hear the premise of a customs officer who forms an unexpected bond with a stranger she investigates, and assume you have a solid idea of the drama and romance that will unfurl. You’re wrong. Even if you know Border is adapted from a short story from Let The Right One In author and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, you can’t possibly conceive of the wild, disturbing yet beautiful story that’s lies within. And better yet, its unnerving surprises are just part of what makes this movie absolutely marvelous. [Read more…]

Suspiria

October 25, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

There are several ways of remembering a nightmare. Interpreting a classic work always requires a true sense of daring. When literature has become canon or a film a cultural staple, updating a story for a new age will bring with it the baggage of decades. For our new era of ghouls and menacing shadows, director Luca Guadagnino has decided to conjure his own interpretation of Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria. This new version (2018), nearly 3 hours in length, is not worthy of the label “remake.” Guadagnino has taken Argento’s pulpy, color-strewn cult object and transformed it into a work of an almost occult power. It is a film set in the very decade of the original, but it seems to be channeling our own, present sense that dark forces at work in the world. To compare the two versions is to compare two eras and mindsets, two interpretations of the extreme and satanic. [Read more…]

Mandy

September 27, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

The mythological still channels our innermost desires. Myths crystalize what we wish to be, or how we would like to divide the world in terms of good and evil, with a simplicity that is crystalline. This same mythic power fuels Mandy, a wild and haunting cinematic creation. A hallucinatory film with the logic of a nightmare, it manages to combine camp, horror and moments of profound drama in a bizarre yet beautiful canvas. Director Panos Cosmatos announces himself here as an original talent on par with other recent masters of trippy cinema like Nicolas Winding Refn or Guy Maddin. Yet while Cosmatos may bask in the kind of outrageous, visceral creativity more common in post-modern experimentation, his film is a myth forged out of deep fires. It is not an exaggeration to call it Homeric, for it is a journey that feels classic even as it takes place in a modern world. Completing this film’s strange power is Nicolas Cage, who delivers a performance of astounding fury, as if he were a fanatic engaged in holy war. There is a lot of blood in Mandy (2018), as well as chainsaws, burning buildings, drugs and even animation, but it’s never shallow or stale. [Read more…]

Sorry To Bother You

July 13, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

You’ve never seen anything quite like Sorry to Bother You (2018). The provocative feature debut of rapper-turned-writer/director Boots Riley tackles race and capitalism with a ferocious and fantastical sense of humor that will have audiences alternately gasping and scream-laughing.

Lakeith Stanfield stars as Cassius Green, a young black man struggling to make his way at a shady telemarketing firm in Oakland. To show his discomfort in this gig, Riley throws his hero full-bodied into this interruptive workflow. When Cassius places a call, he and his desk are literally dropped into strangers’ homes, crashing into their family dinners, tearful moments of solitude, or frenzied sexual trysts. His girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), has no qualms about her survival job; she spins signs by day so she can make political performance art by night. But Cassius grows frustrated making little money in a job he feels gives him no purpose. That is until a long-timer (Danny Glover) offers a crucial tip for success: “Use your white voice.” [Read more…]

Prototype

June 17, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

By Alci Rengifo

One cannot simply write a review of Blake Williams’s immersive, hypnotic experimental film Prototype (2017). It is more appropriate to comment on this film as the description of an experience. Whether taken in as a 3D experience or as a standard, 2D film, Protoype attempts to create an environment with the very idea of cinema itself. Cinema in its most primal form is a collection of images, rushing one after the other, weaving a tapestry. Williams’s work has a kinship with the early avant-garde cinema which experimented with the marriage of image and narrative, producing works which today have a dreamlike intensity. This intensity comes from the passage of time, because now these films can feel like a transmission from some other age or world. Herman G. Weinberg’s 1931 “film poem,” Autumn Fire, is such a film, with its silent black white imagery of nature, a wandering man in silhouette, a daydreaming woman and breezy waters. As modern pop culture came to be in the 1960s, artists like Andy Warhol would push the very boundaries of what cinema as an art form even meant. His 7-hour Empire is simply one still shot of the Empire State Building. [Read more…]

First Reformed

May 18, 2018 By Cvon Leave a Comment

There can be nothing more dangerous than an awakened consciousness. Paul Schrader’s new and fierce work, First Reformed (2017), is a portrait of a man connecting with a world in crisis, even as he is silently torn by his own scars. Beautifully composed, it is a film that reaches well beyond the surface of its story. It is about the very condition and mood of our times, and the palpable sense of some oncoming cataclysm.

We are but individuals operating within the larger panorama of societies and nations. Some of us are bond strong by belief systems; others despair within their beliefs at a world symbolically ready to burn. Paul Schrader has been a filmmaker of the latter ilk since his early days when he composed furious, violent works which, even when featuring traditional plots, displayed an artist grappling with the spirit and the flesh. [Read more…]

November

March 12, 2018 By Cvon 1 Comment

Cinema has the capacity to become a conduit for dreams and nightmares, combining both into something the ancients could have scarcely imagined- the physical manifestation of myth. If critics such as Roland Barthes and Octavio Paz are correct, then the ritual of cinema or television has replaced the pagan rituals of old. Yet the primitive force of myth remains embedded in human expression, no matter if the medium has changed. Estonian filmmaker Rainer Sarnet’s new film, November (2017), is pure myth, a fairy tale lifted from the page and given life by moving images, the reverie of cinematography and the atmosphere of music. It is imagined and produced with a vivid sense of time and place, yet creating an environment outside of time. And like all myths, its grand and magical flourishes are decorations for a story that is simple in its evocation of human feelings, desires and experiences. [Read more…]

Thelma

November 9, 2017 By Cvon 1 Comment

Cinema can become a tool for the exorcising of demons. Repressions and life experiences can suddenly be evoked and shared with everyone in the theater or watching at home. Joachim Trie’s dark and perceptive film, Thelma (2017), is a gothic parable which serves as an interesting examination of the consequences of repression. A young girl becomes the receptor of her parents’ rigid, one could say Puritan, religious views of the world. Released in only a few arthouse venues and now available for streaming via Amazon, Thelma touches upon issues rarely gazed upon by mainstream/fantasy cinema. In an increasingly secular- albeit not rational- world, organized religion is being relegated more to a habit of the past. It even seems the Pope now claims hell does not exist. But for those raised within islands of dogma, belief is a very powerful and palpable part of life. [Read more…]

The Florida Project

October 6, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment

Writer/director Sean Baker does not make flashy films, but slowly unfolding, naturalistic narratives that’s revelations bloom for hours and days after you’ve first seen them. In 2015, he had critics raving over Tangerine, his heartwarming and at times hilarious breakout about a pair of trans sex workers. For his follow-up, Baker awes with his frank yet beautiful portrait of poverty-stricken Americans living in the shadow of The Happiest Place On Earth.

Set down the highway from Orlando’s Disney World, The Florida Project (2017) focuses on the people scraping by at a rundown motel called The Magic Castle. [Read more…]

Blue My Mind

October 4, 2017 By Cvon 1 Comment

Becoming a woman can be a traumatizing experience. Your body transforms. It bleeds. Your hormones swing wildly, subjecting you to fits of rage, sadness, lust, and self-doubt. You may look in the mirror and see someone you don’t recognize. You might rebel against this lack of control by acting out with booze, sex, and drugs. In these regards, the 15-year-old heroine of Blue My Mind (2017) is pretty common. But where this Fantastic Fest entry takes a dramatic and sensationally strange turn is that she is not becoming a woman. She’s becoming a mermaid. Far from a fantastical and glamorous experience, it’s one swimming in trauma and body horror. [Read more…]

Get Out

October 3, 2017 By Cvon Leave a Comment