Three lessons from Fantasporto 2020 first published by Sight & Sound 1) Longevity is its own reward Dreamt up in 1980 by a trio of film fanatics, two of whom – Beatriz Pereira and Mário Dorminsky – incredibly are still running it 40 years later, Fantasporto was Portugal’s only film festival back then, and…
“Don’t worry, I’m method.” With these words, young, entitled starlet Gia Fontaine (Alexa Maris) justifies her insistence upon improvising a scene (about a meeting between a long-estranged mother and daughter) before she has even finished reading the script pages. “Oh,” says Lena O’Neil (Barbara Crampton), rolling her eyes, “Got it.”. Middle-aged Lena – old enough…
An isolated house in the country. Chains hanging over a wall’s blood-spattered tiles. Glass jars full of guts, sinews and body tissue. An upset young woman sat at a table, loading a gun. And a female voiceover intoning: “When I was a girl, my mother took a hairpin and pricked the end of my finger….
Summer Scars first published on EyeForFilm There must be something in the water. As Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986), Jacob Aaron Estes’ Mean Creek (2004) and James Watkins’ Eden Lake (2008) can all attest, films concerned with the more sociopathic aspects of disaffected youth tend to have an aquatic reference in their title, marking that fluid, liminal…