Rob Humanick, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? Jean Genet and Marisa don’t toast to their kids because they’re decent human beings fighting heterosexual patriarchy, but for being the “devilish bitch” and “dirty-mouthed trans” that they are. Whether or not the answer surprises us during these cynical times, the aftermath is as disarming as it is disturbing. Cast: Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Ally Ioannides, Katie Aselton Director: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead Screenwriter: Justin Benson Distributor: Well Go USA Running Time: 96 min Rating: R Year: 2019. One of the most common claims made about horror films is that they allow audiences to vicariously play with their fear of death. The elegance and control of Ham on Rye’s aesthetic is breathtaking, especially considering the film’s shoestring production. This region is where Jeffrey Epstein allegedly outright purchased a young woman, Nadia Marcinko, and where Donald Trump’s third wife (whom Epstein claimed to have introduced to the Donald) hails from as well. full of resolution but he had little hope.” Then, sentences later, the Cast: Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris, Gloria Foster, Martin Priest, Leonard Parker, Yaphet Kotto, Stanley Greene, Helen Lounck Director: Michael Roemer Screenwriter: Michael Roemer, Robert M. Young Distributor: Artists Public Domain/Cinema Conservancy Running Time: 95 min Rating: NR Year: 1964 Buy: Video, Review: Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar on Kino Lorber Blu-ray, Review: Robert M. Young’s The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez on Criterion Blu-ray, Blu-ray Review: Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man Joins the Shout! Nayman only deviates from this concept once, as 2017’s Phantom Thread, Anderson’s eighth and most recent film, is saved for last and presented as a culmination of a blossoming sensibility. What’s Borat to do? opponents brings love and respect into an equation with death, as It’s a fable of modernity darkened with war, obsession, and madness. too far.”. Or, when Duffy is with his blue-collar pals, smiles may mask envy, verbal sparring, or bitter recriminations that have no other outlet. © Beija Flor Filmes. Following the massive global success of Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen’s most indelible comic creation became a victim of his own success. Additional information is available in this. A trip to the Texas State Fair—with Borat disguised, as he is for much of the film, as a grizzled hayseed with a Prince Valiant hairdo—would seem to offer endless opportunities for up-close-and-personal pranks, but instead it’s largely just the backdrop for a few sight gags. It tells us bruised romantics that we’re all in this together, thus offering evidence that we may not be as alone as we may think. Already, others are sharing their enthusiasm for Nothing but a Man; as I write, critics Peter Bradshaw and Jason Solomons have both recently tweeted about the rewards of discovering what was hitherto, for them as for me, a completely unknown film. He plans to do exactly what’s expected of him—that is, to join the army and marry a nice girl who will probably just make him sleep on the living room couch like his mother (Sharon Horgan) does to his father (Barry Ward). The resulting anarchy unleashed by the Gremlins during the yuletide season is appropriate, considering they were created when Zach Galligan’s Billy, like an official advocating free-market deregulation, ignored foreboding warnings that terror would occur if he had just stuck to the three simple rules of caring for Gizmo, the cutest of all Gremlins. Santiago’s pride also motivates his desire to transcend What are Norman Bates and Jack Torrance besides eerily all-too-human monsters? 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. He frequently cordons people off by themselves in individual frames, serving the low budget with pared-down shot selections while intensifying the lonely resonance of a man set adrift with his cravings. Justin Simien’s 2014 feature-length directorial debut, Dear White People, translated so neatly to an extended TV format in large part due to its plethora of characters and plot threads, and Bad Hair similarly evinces his keen eye for humanity. But in their latest, Synchronic, the filmmakers do the fitting for you. . Things come to a head in a showy dramatic scene roughly halfway through the film set inside a swanky hotel ballroom. The closing 10 minutes come from a different era in filmmaking, when horror movies could spit in the eye of the status quo and say that good doesn’t always prevail, no matter how much we’d like it to. And as their own faux love affair begins to crumble, they can at last embrace the queerness and messy feelings for which there is no required language, no blueprints, and as such the opportunity to actually find a place that won’t kill them. can prove himself. But none of that would count for very much if the film didn’t ring so bracingly and unusually true. Nolasco alternates between explicitly sexual, neon-colored sequences that veer toward complete dreamscapes and the kind of European-film-festival-courting realism that Brazilian cinema is known for. Anderson’s films toggle between valorizing and criticizing men of industry who’ve, with a few exceptions, made America in their own neurotic image. Despite being one of Bava’s simpler works, or perhaps because of that very reason, A Bay of Blood has proven to be the foremost progenitor of the slasher film, the one in which the Jason Voorheeses and Ghostfaces owe their blade of choice to. Some people believe that Anderson uses such devices to write himself out of corners, excusing himself from the task of building relationships or establishing in more detail the contours of the history informing the films, while, for his admirers, such flourishes are suggestive and freeing—excusing not only the author, but the audience from thankless exposition so as to skip to the “good parts,” the moments that cut to the heart of the protagonists’ and Anderson’s demons. These works of horror-tinged science fiction draw the viewer in through their ambiguous relationships to traditional space and time; they’re complicated puzzles, and a good part of their fun is trying to fit the pieces together. 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After being sentenced to a gulag for disgracing his country with his prior film, Borat is offered by former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev (Dani Popescu) a chance to redeem himself by traveling to America and gifting Vice President Mike Pence with the locally famous simian porn star Johnny the Monkey. It is this conscious decision to act, to fight, to never give up that enables Santiago to avoid defeat. It can’t be overstated just how Nothing But a Man is militantly tone-deaf to the Hollywood muzak of race relations. source of Santiago’s greatest strength. Almost without exception, movies about the minority experience in 1960s America were smoothed-over paeans to “the triumph of the human spirit,” starring or co-starring whites whose presence is required as witnesses, arbiters, and the final, thankful beneficiaries of growth and change. But the filmmakers fill out the familiar framework of Ruben’s dilemma with an acutely detailed portrait of a deaf community headed by the serene and compassionate Joe (Paul Raci), a former addict who lost his hearing during Vietnam and firmly believes that deafness isn’t a handicap. Cinematographer Carson Lund bathes the story’s neighborhood settings in a pastel light that again evokes the ‘70s—or, at least, modern pop culture’s impression of the decade. . It’s Gus Van Sant through a Southern-gothic haze, thrumming with an urgency bestowed by Tangerine Dream’s score and thematic heft alike. What Types of Plays Did Shakespeare Write? “Fucked!” That’s how Michael Gira described how his hearing is after a live show in a 2015 interview with the Guardian. When Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a 12-year-old outcast perpetually bullied at school, meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), the mysterious new girl at his apartment complex, one child’s painful coming of age is conflated with another’s insatiable bloodlust. Now came the trickiest part of actually acquiring the film: finding out (a) what materials existed – fortunately, the Library of Congress were able to help on that front – and (b) who on earth owned the rights. would have been short-lived. After her friends seem to vanish transcendently into thin air after the dance, Haley is left behind with her despondent family, perhaps stranded in childhood or simply this town, and the film abruptly shifts atmospheres. Though ostensibly a reflection of small-town Kazakh life, Cohen’s vision of Kazakhstan is really an elaborate amalgamation of various Warsaw Pact countries, including Russia and Poland, and though Borat himself would be loath to admit it, his incomprehensible language draws inspiration from Romani and Hebrew. It’s a delirious fever dream grounded periodically by masterfully constructed scenes of carnage and the rooting of its mythology in the period’s twin boogeymen of addiction and infection. Also, Zemeckis fortunately didn’t feel a need to repeat the previous film’s coda, which tried in slapdash fashion to cast some light on a chilling Grimmsian fairy tale about murdered children. The Grand High Witch of this version, played by Anne Hathaway, has the same sashaying arrogance, but it’s more suited for a fashion show’s runway than a child’s nightmares. Dillard, John Carpenter’s 1995 sleeper is a lot of things: a noir, a Stephen King satire, a meta-meta-horror workout, a parody of its own mechanics. An overview of Black Power on film, 10 great breakthrough American indie films, Scarecrow: rediscovering a gem of 1970s cinema. And the Quibi-sized trips to the past are the high points of Benson and Moorhead’s latest, evocative glimpses of a long and diffuse history, from the wooly mammoths and prehistoric men of the Ice Age, to the conquistadors and bayou alligators of colonization, to the racist rednecks of the early 20th century. This genre resents platitude (certainly, you can count the happy endings among these films on one hand), but the good horror film usually isn’t cynical, as it insists on the humanity that’s inextinguishable even by severe atrocity. Such details point to the influence of many titans of the cinema, among them Brian De Palma, Peter Weir, and David Lynch. His other film, 1964’s Nothing But a Man, is often compared by critics to the slicker, middle-America-friendly films Sidney Poitier was making during the same era.