Screen Anarchy

A peerless actress was Gena Rowlands. She was also the muse of actor and rightly renowned avant-garde filmmaker John Cassavetes (†1989), to whom she was married from 1954. It was an inspiration that was mutual. A number of great Cassavetes films are unthinkable without Rowlands. They married and had three children. Children who would also become filmmakers themselves. She started acting young and continued to act into old age, consequently having a career that spanned some seventy years from her first roles in films such as Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959) to later films such as 2004’s The Notebook directed by her son Nick Cassavetes in which she plays a woman with dementia, the condition that would also affect her in old age. You could say she…

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The British BBC documentary Ukraine: Enemy in the Woods dryly and with restraint shows the harshness and bloodiness of life and death on the Ukrainian front this past winter. Drones and increasingly precise artillery are turning life on both sides of the front into a constant lottery with death or loss of limb. A single Ukrainian infantry company finds itself in a life-and-death struggle to defend the eastern front against intense Russian attacks. This is an extraordinary portrait of lives endangered by the turmoil of a bloody war, filmed by the Ukrainian soldiers themselves. With exclusive access to the tightly controlled front line, the film follows the mission of a special battalion as they make a single deployment to one of Ukraine’s most violent fronts:…

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Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan reflects on the serendipitous journey from a young boy mesmerized by Yash Chopra’s films to becoming one of Bollywood’s most celebrated stars, all while maintaining a humble, grounded approach to stardom.

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Many years following the apocalypse, a devout cult of mute zealots hunts down Azrael, a young woman who escaped her own imprisonment- and she will stop at nothing to ensure her own survival.

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Beth (Courtney Halverson) and Jay (Mark Famiglietti) want to celebrate a one-year anniversary of Beth’s cancer remission. Apparently, neither of them is acquainted with horror classics, so they decide to go on a camping trip to the woods. Everyone familiar with the genre can easily imagine about a dozen different scenarios of how things might go wrong, and here Consumed offers its biggest (honestly – its only) surprise by introducing two menaces at once. First, Beth makes a gruesome discovery in the woods (valuable piece of advice from horror fans number one: upon finding, seeing or hearing something disturbing – run), and soon a skin stealing creature attacks the couple. Then, they are saved by a brooding, silent man (Devon Sawa) with a rifle. Valuable…

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Alexandra Rapaport and Tobias Santelmann star in the psychological thriller series from Sweden, making its U.S. premiere on Viaplay.

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In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: several music videos by Alex Proyas. I’m an Alex Proyas-apologist. His film record is widely considered spotty with Dark City and The Crow having a deservedly large cult following, I Robot and Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Cloud having some staunch defenders, and Knowing and Gods of Egypt only being defended by a handful of people (including me). Garage Days? Well, that one doesn’t measure up to the rest, which I do all love wholeheartedly. There is a reason it was forgotten, but its inclusion in the Proyas-canon does make sense when you realize that he started out doing music videos. So him directing…

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The 77th Locarno Film Festival culminated in a triumph for Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic, which led the awards tally alongside notable wins for Kurdwin Ayub’s Moon and Laurynas Bareiša’s Drowning Dry, showcasing a diverse range of new cinematic voices.

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Last month, the 2024 edition of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival ended, so normally by now we’d have finished our coverage. But the review for Emma Benestan’s Animale, internationally distributed as Animal, lived rent-free in my brain for weeks, while I tried to get a handle on what I wanted to tell while taking care not to reveal too much. It was one of the best films at the festival, a closing title at the Critics Choices in Cannes this year and the opening title at Neuchâtel. It is also one of those rare films in which you feel yourself transported to the region where the story takes place, in this case the Camargue in the South-East of France. So why the reluctance and…

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Martha Coolidge might be more known for her teen-focused comedies such as Valley Girl and The Prince and Me, but her work has always been forward-thinking in representations of women, and likely none of her films showcase this more than her 1976 dramatic feature debut. Not a Pretty Picture was not only revolutionary for its time, but remains one of the most raw and insightful films on rape. Not a Pretty Picture is part documentary, about making a film that explores Coolidge’s experience of date rape when she was young, and the story itself. 16-year-old Martha (Michele Maneti) is promised a fun weekend of sightseeing and parties in New York, with some school chums, including the slightly older Curly (Jim Carrington). What she gets, though,…

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