Director: Ilya Naishuller Stars: RZA, Connie Nielsen, Bob Odenkirk I'm currently under siege from a nudist junkie wannabe-DJ next-door neighbour in his late 40s who insists on playing loud '90s dance music at all hours, often for up to 12 hours at a time. Just recently, this has included a 10-day jag of consecutive all-night … Continue reading Review: Nobody
Director: Emerald Fennell Stars: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Jennifer Coolidge Part of the established contract of rape-revenge cinema is the catharsis offered when the attackers are confronted and justice is meted out. Having endured the ordeal of her experiences, having suffered with her, we're to be sated by this reprisal, by her violence. In the … Continue reading Review: Promising Young Woman
Director: Richard Shepard Stars: Logan Browning, Allison Williams, Steven Weber I've not been well this week, but with flashes of a renewed attention span, I have picked this title at random out of the trash bags of new content heaped onto Netflix on a weekly basis. The Perfection is a riotous misnomer for this scattershot … Continue reading Review: The Perfection
Director: Coralie Fargeat Stars: Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Kevin Janssens, Vincent Colombe Of all of horror's myriad subgenres, the rape revenge film is one of the most troubling and misunderstood, in part because the films themselves divide distinctly from one another. Calling attention to all the most negative connotations are movies which treat the abuse … Continue reading Review: Revenge
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos Stars: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan "It was very Lynchian," I overheard a gentleman tell his wife upon leaving the screening of The Killing Of A Sacred Deer that I attended, as the varied audience tried to get a handle on what they'd just been through. Now, everyone is most certainly entitled to … Continue reading Review: The Killing Of A Sacred Deer
Director: Macon Blair Stars: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, Robert Longstreet First of all, Melanie Lynskey kills it here, so there's that, okay? She's just the best. I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore. is the feature debut from Macon Blair, star of Jeremy Saulnier's Blue Ruin (he also played a supporting role in Green Room). The sensibility … Continue reading Review: I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore.
Director: Tom Ford Stars: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon Have you ever found yourself at 8 in the evening on a Sunday, feeling like you want to watch a movie before calling it quits on the weekend, but finding yourself torn between the pulpy Texan noir of Cold In July and the weepy melodrama of, … Continue reading Review: Nocturnal Animals
Director: Paul Greengrass Stars: Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Tommy Lee Jones Movies take a long time to make, even within the ever churning gears of the Hollywood machine, and so there's no way that Universal or the producers of the latest Jason Bourne film (woodenly titled Jason Bourne) could possibly have anticipated the recent and tragic events … Continue reading Review: Jason Bourne
Conventional wisdom tells us that violence and vengeance form a circle, but that notion suggests the return to a beginning place, a place of innocence where said violence existed only in potential. What if, instead, it were a spiral, emanating from a microcosmic central point, it's range growing ever-wider as it sprawls out into the universe? How … Continue reading Review: The Revenant
Year: 1981 Director: Abel Ferrara Stars: Zoë Lund (Thana), Albert Sinkys (Albert), Darlene Stuto (Laurie), Helen McGara (Carol), Nike Zachmanoglou (Pamela), Editta Sherman (Mrs. Nasone) Genre: Thriller, Exploitation Quantifying why I love Ms. 45 is going to be trickier than most of these essays as it can be a hard film to love, or rather, can seem … Continue reading Why I Love… #83: Ms. 45
"A mysterious outsider's quiet life is turned upside down when he returns to his childhood home to carry out an act of vengeance." There are two sentences that make up the brief 'storyline' section on Blue Ruin's imdb page. That's the first of them. And it kind of misrepresents a film that has already had a … Continue reading Review: Blue Ruin
