At the centre, or is it the outer periphery, of the intricately constructed universe in The Wheel Of Heaven is an ongoing conversation between actress Kali Russell and director Joe Badon. Badon and his co-writer Jason Kruppa have scripted a rape scene involving Russell’s character Purity which Russell would prefer to see written out of…
Candyman (2021) first published by VODzilla.co It is in the nature of myths to change. When writer/director Bernard Rose adapted Clive Barker‘s short story The Forbidden (1985) into the film Candyman (1992), he translocated events from Barker’s native Liverpool in Thatcher-era England to the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago, and so introduced a long history of…
Back in 1970, Crimes of the Future was in fact David Cronenberg’s second feature – but since then both he and the future have changed considerably, and accordingly his latest feature of the same title is in fact an entirely different film, even if it looks back to motifs from his earlier films, especially Rabid…
Trust opens with an impressionistically glimpsed and artfully effaced couple having panting, passionate sex, while a series of increasingly urgent incoming text messages (“You OK?” “Call me back.” “Call me!”) is ignored. Next we see Brooke Gatwick (Victoria Justice) returning with a suitcase to her New York apartment, where she greets Owen Shore (Matthew –…
Bliss introduces us to the crumbling world and fragmenting headspace of Dezzy Donohue (Dora Madison). A Californian artist who has run out of creative juice, Dezzy has twice asked for extensions on her latest commission, and is getting nowhere with it. David (Chris McKenna), her agent of long standing, can see the writing (if not…
The Driller Killer first published by Little White Lies, as part 22 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column The name alone of Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer was enough to get it on the Video Nasties list, at a time when VHS copies of Samuel Fuller’s WWII drama The Big Red One were briefly being seized by…
In the opening scene of Benavidez’s Case, in which a Board of art dealers discusses the current financial returns on the contemporary art scene, we learn that Pablo Benavidez (Guillermo Pfening) is both Argentina’s most in-demand artist, and dead. Everyone wants a piece of Benavidez for their own, but with no possibility of further production,…
Edvard Munch first published by Film4 Synopsis: Peter Watkins’ recently restored telefilm documents the angst of an artist and an era. Review: Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch opens with both a text (in Norwegian) and a voice-over (in English, narrated by Watkins) that impart introductory information about both the film’s use of Munch’s diaries as source material and Munch’s…