Curious is the current emphasis on women’s trauma in American genre film—the way it’s discussed online, marketed, singled out in the headlines—as if trauma were not already deeply embedded in the historical fabric of horror movies. Of course, in a time when more women filmmakers than ever are being given the opportunity to tell their stories, the rise of feminist horror should come as no surprise, especially given the #MeToo phenomenon and efforts to destigmatize mental illness.

Continue reading ‘The Blazing World’ Treats Female Trauma Like An Amusement Park Funhouse [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

13-year-old Sammy Ko (Miya Cech) is a problem child. Prone to skipping class, smoking cigarettes, and mouthing off to her teachers, she’s the opposite of the meek model student Hollywood typically imagines when writing young Asian-American characters. Our scowling heroine’s got baggage, and a lot of pent-up anger, in part because things are beginning to get serious between her workaholic dad, Angus (Leonardo Lam), and his girlfriend, Marianne (Paulina Lule).

Continue reading ‘Marvelous And The Black Hole’: An Angsty Teenager Finds Solace In Magic & An Unlikely Friendship [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

With her frayed blonde hair and moody coal-black eye makeup, rock band singer Marian (Alessandra Mesa) doesn’t immediately appear to resemble her identical twin sister. Practically a Stepford wife with her demure manner and neat brown bob, Vivian (Ani Mesa) lives with her loser husband (Jake Hoffman) in the same house the sisters grew up in. She’s stifled by her domestic routine of cleaning, gardening, and grocery shopping, but too meek to do anything about it—perhaps because that audacious, thrill-seeking part of her has gone missing, quite literally, with the disappearance of her other half some six years ago. 

Continue reading ‘Superior:’ A Stylish, Droll Noir That Explores Identity [Sundance Review] at The Playlist.

Somewhere between the transcendent Alfred Hitchcock original and a total misfire lies Ben Wheatley’s shiny new “Rebecca.” An innocuous adaptation of the 1938 novel by Daphne Du Maurier, the latest Net-flick should reignite debate over the reasons why certain properties are exhumed while others aren’t. For something like Hitch’s 1940 classic, a decent justification might be that the new version fleshes out latent meanings in a more satisfying way—the queer relationship between Mrs.

Continue reading ‘Rebecca’: Ben Wheatley’s Hitchcock Riff Is A Pale Iteration Of A Classic Gothic Horror at The Playlist.

Among the many things suspended during these plague times of social distancing and self-quarantine is the friendly visit, those excursions we take to friends’ houses just to hang out and catch up, exchange banalities and intimacies between sips of wine on the couch. These meetings yield insights of a different nature than those gleaned from eavesdropping, or those extracted from drunken confessions at the bar—who are our friends on their own turfs? Who else will come knocking at their doors?

Continue reading ‘The Woman Who Ran’: Hong Sang-Soo’s Offbeat Film Examines The Textures Of Female Relationships [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

If a film such as “The Irishman” or “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is unnecessarily long, then what will people say about “Malmkrog,” Cristi Puiu’s three-and-a-half-hour period adaptation? Focused almost entirely on the intellectual discussions of five aristocrats gathered at a wintry Transylvanian mansion in the early 1900s, “Malmkrog” belongs to the milieu of cerebral art-films whose arduousness is perhaps exactly the point. Cinephiles with a taste for the hardcore, painful pleasures of slow cinema, are encouraged to read further, but it’s difficult to recommend this feature to the movie-goer unacquainted with or baffled by the sorts of films in which “nothing happens.” Imagine “My Dinner With Andre” without the intimacy and zany charisma.

Continue reading ‘Malmkrog’: Cristi Puiu’s Ambitious Period Film Is Demanding & Beautiful Slow Cinema [NYFF Review] at The Playlist.

How does the historical nightmare of slavery inhabit the present day? “Antebellum,” the feature-length debut of directing duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, tackles this question, once explored with originality and nuance by Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” with shallow simplicity. For all its ideas—the existential threat to white supremacy posed by Black success, the lingering effects of intergenerational trauma, and the insidious romanticization of the Confederacy— “Antebellum” contains symbols rather than people and intrigue without meaningful discovery.

Continue reading ‘Antebellum’ Relies On Exploitation And Rehashed Ideas To Tackle Racial Dynamics [Review] at The Playlist.