As the schemer-in-chief, Benicio del Toro’s stone face is a perfect vehicle for Anderson’s deadpan style of humour, and his capacity to straddle even the thickest borders between good and evil, nasty and nice, callous and ingenuous, allows him to play with the darker tone of his director’s latest verbose, and unusually action-packed, screenplay.
film review
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Fear Street: Prom Queen splits the difference between its twin target audiences of ageing VHS-weaned gorehounds and their phone-thumbing teenage descendants with [pullthis id="axe"]a big axe[/pullthis] and a mordant smirk on its face. Its thrills are cheap, and it panders to your basest requirements; but then the exact same thing could be said about a Netflix subscription.
Barring a change of heart in his unimaginable dotage, Tom Cruise gives us one last hurrah for his team of super-spies whose average workday includes falling out of planes, climbing on the outside of a skyscraper, or almost drowning in a gigantic washing machine.
Babak Anvari directs Hallow Road with the thwarted urgency of helplessness, obviating any need to cut away to the accident itself, or to punctuate with exterior shots of the car speeding by, blowing up a tiny tornado of dead leaves in its wake. With such intense and convincing actors at his disposal, he makes an unnerving virtue out of the physical limitations he’s imposed on himself.
Given its largely banal story and undeniable visual flair, the obvious conclusion to draw is that Hurry Up Tomorrow is a 105-minute music video. Although director Trey Edward Shults works very hard indeed to shoot and cut the offstage action like a thriller, he drenches so much of it with a purple rain of pulsating epileptic light that it has a soporific effect which no amount of frantic cocaine-rush editing can awaken us from.
After more than a decade away, the disembodied spectre of Death returns to haunt a new shoal of hapless victims by masquerading as a series of stylishly mounted and entertainingly ridiculous ‘accidents’. In an attempt to freshen its foul breath, this time the filmmakers have gone big AND gone home – the initial premonition of mayhem that kicks everything off takes place decades in the past, therefore our conceptual baddie decides that entire generations of a family need to be wiped out.
Gloriously mental psychological thriller in which Nicolas Cage’s frayed masculinity is subjected to a series of Herculean tests by a gang of malevolent larrikins on an Australian beach, when all he wants to do is hang ten in the swell (or whatever surfers do) while reconnecting with his teenage son.
A clinical psychiatrist gets a taste of his own medicine when his treatment of a semi-schizophrenic patient backfires, so that his own grasp on reality grows ever more tenuous, taking us on an arresting, genre-splicing adventure through a version of Hong Kong choking on the fallout of the 2008 financial crash.
In taking the action away from Prague, where Meyrinck’s gothic horror takes place, Szulkin performs the neat trick of also bringing along another famous resident of that city -- Golem is as much Franz Kafka as it is Meyrinck, if not more so. Which seems a pretty obvious link to make given the subject matter, but he goes a bit deeper than that.
In this stylish but circuitous and needlessly complicated kidnap thriller, cuddly Nick Frost takes a sharp left turn away from his comedy origins and unearths his inner psychopath, as a taxi driver who may sound like a harmless cockney oaf, but who would give Travis Bickle a run for his fare.
Marvel’s latest concoction sees a team of perfectly cast rogues, all of them at least vaguely familiar from supporting roles in prior movies and TV shows, taking on an impossible mission during which they can run, jump, punch, shoot, kick, stab and perhaps find their inner heroes along the way.
The central cinematic thesis is that music is a mystical force that can be used either to heal or to harm. In this particular context the dichotomy goes from gospel, by which one can commune with God, to the blues, by which the guitar becomes a totem of the devil. It’s an idea as old as the Mississippi Delta, and allows the story to dig deep into the roots of African-American culture, by repurposing classic horror tropes and by the selective perversion of religious symbolism.
"Single mum seeks cute, kind man with GSOH; let’s meet in penthouse restaurant for drinks, giggles and … MORE??" At least that’s how Violet hopes her evening will go, until ‘more’ turns out to be a mysterious text message revealing that her young son’s being held hostage and the only way she’ll get him back is to murder her rather promising date.
Second Sight WARNING — contains spoilers for Scanners, The Brood and also (oddly enough) Nightbreed. My first introduction to the work of David Cronenberg may not have been ideal, but it was probably fitting. It was through that classic promo shot of a dude with his head exploding from Scanners, in the pages of a much-thumbed copy of (I think) Starlog which got breathlessly passed round my classroom […]
Bernhard Wenger’s debut feature is a really strong first film, even if it never quite shakes off convention the way it would like. Matthias (Albrecht Schuch) is an actor. Sort of. He is, in effect, an actor for real life scenarios. Single but need a convincing boyfriend to get that couples-only flat? Hire Matthias. Need a pilot for a dad so you’ve got the most exciting parent at class career day? He’s right there.
The beauty of the short-form FF format is that there’s little time for exposition, something which can destroy both horror and SF when not done well. These aren’t Cixin Liu short stories, designed to make you think differently about the nature of the universe -- they’re V/H/S short stories, designed to be spooky, nasty, scary or some combination of the three.
What worked perfectly on a sketchy VHS at home suddenly seemed to fall flat on the big screen. It’s all about the suspension of disbelief -- being able to believe something you know intellectually is a fiction is real. Turns out it’s easier to do that when you’re not in a building whose very existence is predicated on showing people things that don’t exist, and when you’re not in the company of hundreds of people eating popcorn.
Initially conceived as a parody by feminist author and civil rights campaigner Rita Mae Brown, the film was ultimately financed by exploitation maestro Roger Corman, a man whose ‘bung some topless girls in it’ attitude to making his money back leads popular consensus to dismiss the film as the product of a bizarre marriage that ultimately serves to nullify the film’s best intentions.