Five strangers who have all experienced various forms of extreme trauma have all come together to attend a group therapy session run by the ominously-named Dr Hedonia. This gives them all the opportunity to tell their stories in turn — which gives us the opportunity for a neat new anthology movie that also clings to a single story, straddling the divide between the two forms.
film review
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The Gothic romance of James Whale’s 1935 horror classic The Bride Of Frankenstein is drastically relocated to Prohibition-era Chicago and New York, although that element of camp which made the original such a beloved cult item remains intact, and the new setting offers a sly metatextual nod to the era in which it was made.
...the latest in the V/H/S series -- the eighth, in fact, which is impressive for a series devoted to the found footage format, which has long had its day. In fact, calling them VHS just seems weird at this point, as the traditional main audience for new horror movies have probably never used a VHS machine in their lives, and the letters VHS probably mean very little.
...as stylish and well executed as the crimes it depicts, while revealing the weaknesses in the chains binding its litany of incident together. But believable characters and a sly sense of humour lubricate its procedural plot, easing us around its numerous chicanes without diluting their thrill factor.
Park Chan-wook cooks up another idiosyncratic blend of thrills and satirical dark comedy with this sublimely ridiculous tale of a newly redundant paper manufacturer so intent on getting his next job that he’s prepared to terminate the other applicants… with extreme prejudice.
Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy, recently released in a handsome blu-ray slipcase set by Second Sight films, not only offer a hectic thug’s eye view of Copenhagen low-life, they also ask two very important questions. One, who is the titular pusher, and two, what does any of this have to do with a Japanese video game auteur (OK, maybe that one’s just me).
The film articulates the emotion of grief in all its slings and arrows, with a dedicated and sometimes painful sense of reality. It reminds us that, while Shakespeare’s work may be immortal, in his life mortality lay all around him.
With cosmic horror having made something of a sly comeback in recent years (as the malign influence of HP Lovecraft has given way to the Thomas Ligottis and Laird Barrons of this world), there’s never been a better time to immerse yourself in the secrets of this strange, physics-and-architecture-defying house and its wonderful gallery of grotesques for a unique slice of surrealist horror.
Noah Baumbach invokes the self-reflexive spirits of all the great directors who’ve made movies about making movies with this great-looking but languorous and elementally compromised comedy-drama that follows a movie star (George Clooney, by the look of it playing himself) and his forbearing agent (Adam Sandler) on a tour of Europe that soon ripens into a journey around the interior of his own navel.
To be fair, you can see why this film would have been annoying / perplexing to reviewers back in 1981, and many of those issues remain. It is genre-(and gender-)bending in every way. Is it a monster movie? A psychological thriller? A spy film, even, with heavily codified Cold War chic?
Rather than shocking new life into a familiar legend, respectable horror nerd Guillermo del Toro pores over Mary Shelley’s seminal science fiction masterpiece with the studious attention of a literature professor. He follows Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 example (not to mention that of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adaptation of a couple of years earlier) in prioritising fidelity to the source material, although he takes enough liberties to keep it interesting.
1970s suburbia may be unlikely soil in which an accomplished art thief might grow, but America’s most lackadaisical auteur Kelly Reichardt pulls on her apron and prepares a bijou little garden for him anyway, using the dichotomy of his ordinary family life and the high stakes of his profession as her fertiliser. The genre beats are familiar, but she plays them with her customarily light touch and off-kilter rhythm.
Harris Dickinson takes full advantage of his mushrooming acting career by making a writing / directing debut with this defiant and supremely tightly wound drama about Mike, a former prisoner struggling to rebuild his shattered life despite a mess of obstacles threatening to trip him up no matter how hard he tugs at those fabled bootstraps.
Everyone’s favourite ersatz heavy metal band is well and truly put back together for a sequel to one of the cultiest films ever cultivated, 1984’s groundbreaking and enormously influential mock-rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. They’re strapping on their axes and slogging through their greatest hits one more time, aiming their satirical rapiers at a music industry that’s since changed beyond all recognition.
Bob Odenkirk makes a welcome return in this vehemently entertaining action comedy as Hutch Mansell, the retired government assassin who just wants a quiet life with his family, despite having a name so butch he might have climbed out of the womb with a scowl on his face and a knife behind his back.
Ari Aster’s bleak and self-indulgent neo-Western epic casts its Panavisual eye over a New Mexico town riven not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by a mayoral election that divides and threatens to conquer its microcosmic society of cowboys and other, more modern, stereotypes, all of whom have exiled themselves from the wider world but can never quite achieve the level of rugged individualism they’d like.
Having played a schoolteacher in The Teachers’ Lounge and a journalist in September 5, Leonie Benesch completes a triptych of undervalued public servants in this claustrophobic, episodic drama about a nurse juggling the demands of a cluster of patients during the graveyard shift in a Swiss hospital.
Belated sequel to the derivative and half-forgotten horror potboiler about a group of teens who cover up a deadly car accident, but are pursued a year later by their own collective guilt, and more immediately by a mysterious killer with a hook for a hand.