Screen Anarchy

The seventeenth edition of Morbido has all but wrapped up for another year. Despite our absence we were still able to wrangle in some reviews for films made by our friends down south, with one more coming down the pipeline.    Gonzalo Otero’s The Devil’s Teardrop took home the Golden Skull this year in the LatAm while Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath took home the Golden Skull in the section. Yes, the devil was in the details this year.    Morbido alumni Nico and Lucionao Loretti, and Can Evrenol, once again took home Skull Awards for their films 1978 and Sayara respectively.    All the winners and statements from programmer José Luis Mejía Razo and mi padre de teror Pablo Guisa Koestinger lead to the…

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Journalism is in crisis; in part due to people now getting their news from social media, in part due to the web forcing many newspapers and television outlets to publish their work for free; in part due to people not having much disposible income; and as we are seeing in real time, a lot because billionaires are buying newspapers and not letting journalists do their job. But we need information, both in words and in images. Images of war, especially, have brought realities of the experience to the public’s eye in way that cannot be propagandized or disputed by authorities who don’t want you to believe what is witnessed. The work of journalists and photojournalists on the ground is irreplacable. Margaret Moth was at the…

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Father Javier is a man with a mission, and an addiction. His mission is to visit families with family members who are under some kind of spell. Javier does not believe that these incidents are nothing more than psychological or mental issues that can be corrected with the right prescription. Javier addresses his own issues with medication as well. Heroine. Heroine he keeps in a hollowed out crucifix.    Javier wakes up abruptly in a basement, his mentor Ramon at his side. Javier recalls to him a troubling pattern. Every family he visits disappears. All that is left behind are signs of extreme violence and a strange marking indented in the walls. Except this last time Javier woke up from his drug induced blackout to…

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The Taiwanese master of slow cinema discuses VR works, the intersection of theatre, performance art and cinema, and upcoming works.

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In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: How To Destroy Angels’ The Space In Between, directed by Rupert Sanders. Rupert Sanders likes his liquids thick and his protagonists immortal. Allow me to back that statement up: the director of special effects bonanzas thus far has directed three different feature films, none of them based on original properties. Snow White and the Huntsman is an effective retelling of the original fairytale with more than a dash of inspiration from Studio Ghibli thrown in there. Ghost in the Shell is a beautiful-looking adaptation of the anime classic that fundamentally misunderstood the original’s philosophies and the wishes of its fanbase. The Crow is a-sort-of-adaptation of…

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Sam Raimi’s 2009 return to horror after the 1992 Army of Darkness, Drag Me to Hell, is from a more innocent time. Just like ye old E.C. Comics and Tales From the Darkside, Drag Me to Hell is a morality play, but wrapped in a big-budget extravaganza. The film has those hyper-kinetic camera moves and zooms, Raimi’s trademark. This film follows Alison Lohman’s (Gamer) Christine Brown, a loan officer in Los Angeles who’s got her eye on the assistant manager promotion. In order to get it, she’s got to win over her boss, who’s leaning towards giving her misogynistic co-worker the job. Unfortunately, she decides to show her boss that she can “make the hard decisions.” This means that when Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) comes…

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I apologized in the title, and I apologize again here, for propagating the deluge of Christmas themed romantic and family slop on the various streaming services. Recently this is providing much needed work for Lindsay Lohan, albeit Lohan does not appear the one below, there are apparently Mean Girls references contained therein. It being a slow week in key art, and this poster caught my eye not from utter incompetence, but rather peak banality. Design studio Concept Arts has done work in the past for Dennis Villeneuve’s Dune and Blade Runner: 2049 movies, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and if you go back far enough The Coen’s Brother’s iconic poster for Miller’s Crossing. They know what they are doing here, with this generic poster for…

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If there was a Guinness World Record for the most jacked-up Santa in a big-budget, Hollywood-financed, holiday-themed action-comedy, Oscar winner J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) would win hands down and biceps curled for his committed portrayal of Father Christmas (aka, St. Nick, aka Santa Claus) in Jake Kasdan’s (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Zero Effect) otherwise disposable, forgettable Red One. Simmons’ Crossfit-loving, hyper-trophied Santa not only unironically loves those fading odes to crass commercialism, American shopping malls but also works out obsessively in his private gym back at the North Pole, relying on his personal security guard and nominal head of ELF (Enforcement Logistics and Fortification), Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), to spot him when he goes big on bench-pressing free weights….

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Eddie Redmayne, Lashana Lynch, and Ursula Corbero star in a series inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s suspense novel.

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