Screen Anarchy

“A great deal of this actually happened,” states one of the many opening text cards in Stockholm Bloodbath. This is after giving us the exposition that the Danish King Kristian II has placed himself in Sweden to settle some political issues, and this is putting it kindly. In 1502, the world was still feral, and acted as such, kings leading the way into idiocy and violence in the name of heresy. The “great deal” quote lets us know that the film will be taking liberties in the name of artistic license, and that’s fine. In the initial set up of the Swedish wedding, the Danes declare the Swedes treasonous for having dared to call out a particularly bad apple. The Danes attack and kill most…

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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 Jacques Audiard. Jacques Audiard’s newest film, Emilia Pérez will be released this week in cinemas and soon on Netflix. A darling at the Cannes Film Festival, and a probable oscar-contender, the film might seem like an odd fit for Audiard, since it’s a full blown musical. But while Audiard is mostly known for his gritty humanist dramas, like Dheepan, Un Prophéte (A Prophet), De Rouille et d’Os (Rust and Bone) and De Battre Mon Coeur s’Est Arrêté (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), there has been a droll sense of humor to his films before (The Sisters Brothers), some magical realist touches…

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Here at ScreenAnarchy, and indeed in this column, we have a few choice distributors whose works keep popping up. Criterion, Anime Limited, Severin, Arrow, Second Sight, Curzon and several crazy Germans and French ones manage to regularly raise our eyebrows. But there is also StudioCanal, and while they don’t always go crazy with their releases, when they DO, it’s good enough to keep an eye on them. Take their recent 4K-UHD / Blu-ray Limited Edition combo release of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, a surveillance thriller from 1974 starring Gene Hackman and featuring supporting roles for Frederick Forrest and a very young Harrison Ford (as a gay adversary, no less). It’s got bells and whistles, a ton of on-disc extras, and it is an edition…

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How do you capture the essence of Donald Trump? In this case, by capturing an underexposed, pivotal period in his life. The period from 1970 to 1980, when Donald Trump was shaped by his relationship with lawyer Roy Cohn. Or perhaps one should say could have been shaped. After all, the film is fiction, and the story suggests how it might have been. But the portrayal remains close to the reality of the time when Trump was about thirty years old. It is the time when he breaks away from his father and is taken under the wing of lawyer Cohn. Cohn had and maintained a reputation as a tough, ruthless lawyer who would stop at nothing to win. He saw something in the young…

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Boaz Yakin’s Once Again (For the Very First Time) signals something of a rebirth. In it’s opening moments, the protagonist falls from the heavens with bloodied clothing and lands on the doorstep of his love interest. He is a street dancer named DeRay, she’s a slam poet called Naim. They express themselves and their love through their art, him with his body, she with her words. What unfolds is a story of creation and destruction, love and death, God and humanity, told through the blending of stylistically daring film scenes that put dance and poetry front and center. It is a far cry from films like Fresh, Remember The Titans and Uptown Girls, the sort of work that filmmaker Yakin became best known for. Still,…

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One of my favorite films of all time is Gust Van den Berghe’s Lucifer, a film that is so stylistically audacious it is hard to compare it to anything else. Based on a famous Flemish version of the Lucifer-story and set in Mexico, that entire film is shot in a circle aspect ratio. It is a film that calms the viewer into a sense of safety with its deceivingly simple story and hypnotic pace, until a final rug pull turns everything on its head. It is an ending that feels like a betrayal, deliciously, devilishly so. Now Van den Berghe is back with The Magnet Man (originally De magneet man), an equally allegorical tale with roots in historical Flemish religious and cultural practices. In the…

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The lineup for the 13th annual Blood In The Snow Film Festival has been announced.    Lowell Dean’s Dark Match is the opening night film while Vivieno Caldinelli’s Scared Shitless is all set to close out the six day event. Both are fine Canadian genre films that have been enjoying healthy runs on the festival circuit since the Summer, as has Self Driver from Michael Pierro, which was the Best First Feature Award winner at Fantasia.    As expected, the home town audience here in Toronto will get to watch some of the Canadian horror antho series, Creepy Bits, made by a slew of locals in the suburb of Hamilton. Poor Agnes’ Navin Ramaswaran is returning with their new film, Invited.    BiTS has massive short film…

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This news hit the trades a few days ago, over at Variety, and if you haven’t read up on it now is your chance.   Production has begun on a new thriller in the UK called Retreat. It will be the debut feature film for deaf writer/director Ted Evans. On top of that their thriller will star an all-deaf principal cast as well.    Raised in an isolated deaf community, cracks begin to appear in Matt’s seemingly idyllic world when the arrival of enigmatic outsider Eva forces him to question the realities of his identity. Is Matt prepared to discover what lies beneath the surface of his supposedly utopian community and the costs demanded to maintain it? ScreenAnarchy’s parent company XYZ Films is handling worldwide…

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Horror fans, don’t be blue! Just because the Halloween season concluded yesterday, there are still plenty of frightening flicks that await your discovery and/or revisitation. Our favorite horror-focused streamer, Shudder, announced their slate for the Fall and Holiday seasons last month. Next week will see the unveiling of Black Cab, starring Nick Frost in a truly evil role (pictured above, looking like I do every time I drive my car), with Jayro Bustante’s Rita hitting the service on November 22. Our own J Hurtado described the latter film thusly in his review from Fantasia this summer: “Though the film details horrific events in ways close enough to the true tragedy at its core, it barely skirts the horror label, rather placing itself in the world…

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Anticipation for the next Star Wars series, Skeleton Crew, is building and this new trailer builds on top of that. By all appearances it looks like things are back on track, getting ready to deliver some good old fashioned, rollicking space adventure.   We’re ignoring that online fandom is already drawing lines in the sand before a single episode airs. We have… hope… for this new series. Check out the new trailer below the official announcement.    The first two episodes of Skeleton Crew air on Disney+ on December 3rd.    Disney+ released a brand-new trailer and poster for Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,” a fun and exciting, original, live-action series starring Jude Law as a mysterious character (“Jod”) whose true motives are shrouded in…

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