Screen Anarchy

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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Edgar Nito’s rural legend horror flick, A Fisherman’s Tale, opens at dusk with a shot of La Miringua. We’re looking at her from a distance, peering at her through branches of a tree. She is feasting on a goat it looks like, grabbing viscera by the handful. The blood stands out against her stark white skin and hair. This is her (un)natural form, naked and pale as a ghost. She turns to the camera and her pitch black eyes stare back at us, spreading fear into our souls.    The flick is an adaptation of a legend passed down orally from the indigenous Purépecha peoples in the lake regions of Central Mexico, specifically Patzcuaro in the Michoacán state. As we had stated in a festival…

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Easton’s mysterious psychological destruction drives him to the edge of sanity and possible self-harm by those who love him most… his wife and daughter. Will Easton succumb to their increasingly traumatizing pressure, or will he conquer the dark forces at play?   We have an exclusive clip from Chad Bishoff’s psychological thriller Daft State. The film is out now on digital and on-demand platforms as of November 12th, 2024, from Scatena & Rosner Films.    Daft State stars Christopher Backus, Skye P. Marshall, Ka’ramuu Kush, Paulo Costanzo, Jake T. Austin, and Iman Karram. Bishoff produced and wrote the thriller with Sam Harter. Erich Hover also produced with actress Mira Sorvino on board as an executive producer withInny Clemons, Brett Cullen, and Lisa Crnic.    Check…

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In a world of plutocracy, the working-class struggle is not a left or right issue.

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To the sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya leave the city by train to visit a countryside temple where the caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old property at the edge of a forest, near a sleepy little fishing village. Local spirits abound. Wait. Does this all sound kind of familiar?   After 40 years of Studio Ghibli creating masterpiece upon masterpiece, the animation house was sold off to Nippon TV at the end of last year due to a lack of any successors to its founders: Miyazaki-san, who seems to have retired for real this time after many false attempts, and Takahata-san, who passed away in 2018. Given that there may not…

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Payal Kapadia’s soul-stirring docudrama, A Night of Knowing Nothing, delicately weaved together India’s national politics, student protest movement, cinema, and its nostalgia in 2021. Her follow-up narrative film, All We Imagine as Light, proves that she is one of the most exciting new talents emerging in the current international cinema scene. All We Imagine as Light starts with the documentary style footage of bustling Mumbai, as its citizens start the day in a ‘city symphony’ style intro, paired with voice-overs of actual workers who came to the big city, looking for work: street vendors getting ready for their businesses, people hanging on the back of trucks in a packed traffic, large crowds milling into commuter train stations, filling in on crowded train cars, talking, sharing…

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