Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby: Moder Repeats Motherhood Horrors
A palpable, instinctual fascination with the potential horrors of pregnancy are exactly why neonatal dread remains such a fascinating cinematic subgenre. Alas, there are several iconic titles which often seem to eclipse contemporary offerings attempting to examine the inherent tensions associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Johanna Moder’s latest film, Mother’s Baby, is the latest in what seems a perennial cycle revisiting these fears through more outlandish parameters. But hasn’t this been done to death? A suitably paranoia primed lead performance from Marie Leuenberger (and an appropriately sinister Claes Bang) can’t get around the script’s familiar beats, which also feed us details making everything seem too obvious for any real tension to build.… Read the rest
“We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the world,” Shirley MacLaine wrote in her 1985 memoir, Dancing in the Light, one of several publications in which the Academy Award winning actor explored her thoughts on reincarnation. It’s a sentiment which applies to the latest mysterious venture from Argentinean director 
Motherhood approaches the verge of the horrific in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the irrepressibly stressful sophomore film from director 
Tossing us right into the hellfire of an acutely agonizing situation, Charlotte Deville and Arnaud Dufeys’ directorial debut On vous croit (We believe you) is churning potboiler of emotional duress. From the opening frame to the final credits, it’s a film meant to keep the audience on edge, and purposefully at odds with the cheerful resonance of its title, and what such a statement comes to mean for a Belgian mother locked in a grueling custody battle for her two children. Aggravating but ultimately empathetic, it’s set almost entirely within the sterile confines of a judge’s office, which ultimately feels like a structured reprieve whenever we’re forced to stray outside these rigid confines, when its characters are otherwise in the final, collective throes of a nervous breakdown.… 
If Girls on Wire settles on anything clear to say it’s quite simply that crime doesn’t pay, at least judging from the seemingly endless intergenerational ripple effects inspired by criminal activity allowed to fester through an aimless sense of gratitude. It’s quite a significant disappointment coming from Vivian Qu, whose exceptional sophomore film Angels Wear White and simmering 2013 debut Trap Street cemented her as one of the most exciting contemporary Chinese directors of the past decade (and that’s not to mention her producer credits, which include Diao Yi’nan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice, 2014).… 
“I only exist when I am working on a film,” 
While there’s been an uptick in contemporary LGBTQ+ films from India over the past two decades, many have maintained a low international profile with the exception of a few select titles. Auteur fare, such as Deepa Mehta’s exceptional 1996 title Fire, remains nearly unrivaled in its bravura, while the 2020 restoration of India’s first queer film, Badnam Basti (1971), foments the ongoing recuperative legacy of watershed moments. With his semi-autobiographical narrative debut, Cactus Pears,