Screen Anarchy

The foul mouthed holiday film is now, more or less, a cinema tradition.   From Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation to Harold Ramis’s The Ice Harvest, there are plenty of these anti-Christmas yet still kinda Christmas movies across all genres. Smart-ass action movies like Die Hard, most of the work of Shane Black, but also gruesome slasher pictures like Black Christmas, edgy Amblin’ movies like Gremlins, and even Stanley Kubrick’s unclassifiable psychodrama Eyes Wide Shut. There is something about subverting that supposedly wholesome and giving holiday spirit into some alternate kind of energy that filmmakers keep coming back to.   Dito Montiel’s effervescent yet surprisingly violent black comedy noodles around in this this space, to mixed effect. It is set in the…

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Following the loss of his father, a grieving twenty-year-old struggles to hold his family together as an unspeakable darkness plagues his older brother.

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It’s not being provocative — at least not intentionally — to suggest families, biological and otherwise, can seriously f*ck you up. Parents can fail their children. Children can fail their parents. Whether realistic or the opposite, expectations in either direction can lead to heartbreak, despondency, or even trauma, the latter potentially rippling out into adulthood and beyond, invisible to the naked eye, negatively impacting the interior lives of both or either parents and their children. Add substance and alcohol into the mix, along with the emotional volatility and financial insecurity that it implies, and the outcome can be grim for both the substance-alcohol abuser and anyone within their inner circle. That idea animates writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s deeply felt, richly textured, feature-length, Sundance Award-winning debut,…

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For Gen X’ers and Millennials, Superman in live-action form started and ended with Christopher Reeve. Across four films and a decade (1978-1987), Reeve embodied Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Depression-era, comic-book creation, a secular savior, a super-powered alien from a doomed planet, an immigrant raised by kind-hearted adopted parents on a Kansas farm. As the Big Blue Boy Scout, Reeve represented “truth, justice, and the American way,” can-do optimism, never-surrender positivity, and American exceptionalism writ large. Reeve, of course, was none of those things. What he represented to so many and who he was in the real world diverged the moment he stepped off a soundstage, slipped out of his red-and-blue tights, and changed into his street clothes, but for Reeve, it was a role…

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Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, and Renate Reinsve star in director Aaron Schimberg’s newest film.

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Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry lead the voice cast for director Josh Cooley’s animated prequel.

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Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni star in Lisandro Alonso’s new film.

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A special agent is dispatched to investigate a distress call from a round-the-world cruise, only to find the ship eerily abandoned and haunted by a malevolent force that twists sanity into terror.

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I have not seen all of Hong Sang-Soo’s feature films, but I have seen many of them. Starting somewhere in the late 1990s, it took me years to figure out how to watch them. Had this one been made earlier in his career (now spanning over 30 films at this point) it might have saved me some time. No matter, I enjoy doing the work. But for those looking to enter his particular world and worldview, I cannot think of a better entry point than By The Stream.   Like Woody Allen or Wes Anderson, Hong Sang-Soo (hereafter, HSS) often makes iterations of his pet collection of themes and narrative beatsl only he does it in very minimalist style. Typically involving little in the way…

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Variety reported earlier today that Andrea Corsini has begun production on their debut feature film, a psychological horror flick called Beasts of Prey.    “The life of a rich art collector is shattered by a tragic event. Destroyed by this unbearable pain, an instinctive and primordial nature awakens in her that will lead her to destroy her privileged life and build a new idea of family,” Variety   We’d first heard of Beasts of Prey back in 2021 when Corsini brought the project, virtually, to Frontieres. They were able to follow up in person at the market the following year with the same project. Fast foward two years later and production has begun over in Italy. Variety shared news today that Carolyn Bracken and Caroline…

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