If you want horror to be horrifying — scary, as opposed to simply tense or shocking — then it helps to shine a light into the those real-life dark corners that people would rather not investigate. The Babadook does just that, gazing steadily upon the strained and fraying mother-love that …
You can see why the Disney company didn't bother to promote this project, but not why it agreed to produce it in the first place. No flash. No dash. No one (the kiss of death in the American marketplace) to identify with and to root for. The "fault," if such …
With this one added on to Bedroom Window (added on to the screenplay of Silent Partner), Curtis Hanson has taken another long stride toward enthroning himself as the Patricia Highsmith of the cinema. Never mind "the new Alfred Hitchcock" and never mind the "innocent man" theme. What Highsmith knows well, …
Akira Kurosawa's sortie into the chilly white-collar world of corporate corruption is an uneven mixture of muckraking journalism and hysterical revenge tragedy. But the opening segment at least -- twenty minutes on a talk-of-the-town wedding celebration -- is unbeatable in its use of wide-screen space, as it jumps between dense, …
The Coen brothers (director Joel, producer Ethan, writers both) cut right to the heart of the role of the artist in Hollywood. They are too much artists themselves, however, to abide any idealizing or universalizing of their proxy on screen: a Broadway Bolshevik (modelled roughly and rudely on Clifford Odets) …
In the spirit of 1950s sci-fi comes Jeffrey A. Brown’s gripping debut feature. Recent college dropout Randall (Noah Le Gros) is content at the thought of spending an eternity bumming around his father’s spacious waterfront property. Emily (masterfully played by Liana Liberato), his semi-estranged girlfriend, is a brilliant college student …
What is it that will ultimately draw the following four characters together: the misfortunate maintenance man at a men’s sauna, a crooked customs officer, the resilient boss of a glittery nightspot, and the battered B-girl she takes under her wing? Narcotics? Nope. The other drug: money — in this case, …
The cradle of humanity becomes a crucible of its opposite. Netflix's first foray into theaters makes the most of the big screen's additional square footage by placing its small subject on a very large canvas: specifically, Agu (Abraham Attah), an African boy on the cusp of adolescence, navigating his way …
Billed as "a romantic thriller in the tradition of the master of suspense" (you know who, don't you?), this is one of the few such tradition-followers that gets up from its knees and stands eye to eye and/or goes toe to toe with The Master. Part of the reason for …
A tasty dish of British surrealism, and not bad as brain food -- either not a claim to be seriously made for many movies taking place in the aftermath of World War III, this particular version of that war having lasted very nearly two and a half minutes and left …
The awkward goodnight kiss Rachel (writer-director Hannah Pearl Utt) shares in front of the rickety playhouse she calls home trumpets an indie romance. Sit tight. Love will have to wait. Rachel still lives at home and is embarrassed to invite her date inside for a nightcap. One branch below on …
One can easily get lost in the tricky business of signposting the episodes as "real" or "fantasy" in Buñuel's account of a frigid bourgeois housewife's moonlighting at a swank Parisian brothel. (Sunlighting, actually: she's not Belle de Nuit.) The subtitlist for the original U.S. distributor came to his own dubious …