From that scene on, Dating Amber rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship. A more interesting question: Why do we flock to films that revel in what is, in all likelihood, our greatest fear? It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. National Treasure Tiffany ‘New York’ Pollard Returns to VH1 for Reunion Special. The staff member, thinking she’s pregnant and asking for an abortion, firmly assures her that the baby is in fact a blessing, even when he’s under the impression that it was the result of incestuous rape. Wes Greene, Gerald Kargl’s Angst is a 75-minute cinematic panic attack. “He’s a man of miracles,” Gary tells one of his employees. The solution is obvious: to present Pence with his underage daughter instead—which he does, albeit from a distance, dressed as Donald Trump while Pence delivers a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. They’re all victims of Synchronic, a designer drug that literally sends young people, with their soft pineal glands, into the past—and just how far depends randomly on where they are in the present. © 2020 Vox Media, LLC. It’s a fable of modernity darkened with war, obsession, and madness. Boogie Nights, which Nayman calls a two-and-a-half-hour dick joke, even sets the stage for the ironic phallic references of the other films, with their plunging oil derricks, broken glass toilet plungers, and, well, Woodcocks. Perhaps the best tack is that of Sam Neill’s driven-mad investigator, pictured in the film’s final frames hooting at images of himself projected in an abandoned movie theater. But the way Pacino reads the letters is anything but childlike. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. It’s in this film’s elementary plotting that Bava, by withholding information and leaning more on animalistic themes dictating bizarre character motivation, unveils a deceptive depth that the film’s acolytes can’t discern among the copious amounts of blood spilled within its frames. When it’s working and we’re all psychically connected and the music’s taking us over, I can’t imagine anything more exquisite.”. And there are other individual sequences whose discomfiting rawness would not have been out of place in the first film, such as a trip to a Christian-run crisis pregnancy center after Tutar accidentally swallows a baby decoration on top of a cupcake. By the film’s end, Ducournau has hauntingly outlined only a few possibilities for Justine: that she’ll get with the program and regulate her hunger properly, or be killed or institutionalized. Abhimanyu Das. ‘Japanese words are composed of many syllables, and endings are attached to change tense, form a negative, or otherwise modify meaning.’ ‘The ending is after all where most of the subtle action tends to be, with your verb endings, plurals and suchlike.’ Sofia Coppola Calls Spike Jonze Her ‘Practice Marriage’, “It was fun and served its purpose for that time.”, Tim Heidecker: The Poet Laureate of Delusional Assholes. Throughout, Nolasco’s frames are also filled with much hair—hairy faces, butts, and backs, suggesting a queer sexuality cobbled together with the coarseness of the men’s local environment, despite the clearly foreign influence of Nolasco’s hyper-stylized aesthetics. 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The most hideous of this film’s images is a shot of the back of Brian’s neck after Aylmer—an eight-inch-or-so-long creature that resembles a cross between a tapeworm, a dildo, and an ambulant piece of a shit along the lines of South Park’s Mr. Hanky—has first injected him, with its cartography of blood lines that are so tactile we can nearly feel Brian’s pain as he touches it. Most immediately, it’s a pure, visceral pleasure simply to read Nayman’s descriptions of imagery. Synchronic echoes Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel Here and David Lowery’s 2017 film A Ghost Story, exploring a physical location by journeying across time but not space. If only the entire film were up to the standard of that scene, Cohen might have achieved the impossible and lived up to the groundbreaking impact of Borat. The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror. This means some of the plot doesn’t feel credible, as Alice masters LGBTQ resistance discourse perfectly in her interactions both on and offline, but prefers pissing her pants during a class exam, which naturally becomes a viral video, than demanding her right to use the women’s restroom. The adults are forced to contemplate the unthinkable, doing battle with the little monsters and struggling with the notion that they may have to kill or be killed. The rippling of the witches’ bodies as they transform is rendered almost seamlessly. As Ruben begins confronting his current predicament, Sound of Metal risks becoming a familiar, inspirational tale of overcoming one’s disability. In voice-over, he speaks in a broken murmur, the voice not of a man in love, but of one drowning in regret. © 2020 Pitchfork Media Inc. All rights reserved. In one of the original film’s most notorious scenes, rodeo producer Bobby Rowe advises Borat to shave his “dadgum mustache,” which makes him look suspiciously Muslim, so that he might even pass for an Italian. The film stars Al Pacino, Holly Hunter, Harmony Korine, and Chris Messina.It was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. The heartbreaking fall from sanity experienced by the trio of naïve filmmakers preys with ecstatic precision on our most instinctive fears, building to a rousing crescendo of primordial terror that’s arguably unrivaled by anything the genre has seen before or since. Benson and Moorhead, as they did in The Endless, eventually cast off the science that sets their story in motion for the melodrama at its core. Pacino doesn’t wring his hands over the distancing stylization of his acting though, and that’s what makes him great. 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The film treats adolescence, even a vampire’s arrested own, as a prolonged horror—life’s most vicious and unforgiving set piece. The film stars Al Pacino, Holly Hunter, Harmony Korine, and Chris Messina. AJ Manglehorn is an aging, ordinary guy in a small town. David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn is a character study that starts off pretending to be something else — though I can’t say for sure what that something else is.