Wild Fire begins at dawn – a liminal time of change. There is an immaculate garden surrounded by trees and full of birdsong, and beyond it a beautiful modernist home. Upstairs in the bedroom, a glass and wine bottle sit on the floor, and a silk robe lies discarded on the end of the bed….
The Reflecting Skin first published by VODzilla.co The Reflecting Skin begins with little Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) carrying a large frog across a yellow field, and, with help from his friends Eben (Codie Lucas) and Kim (Evan Hall), inflating it with a reed and leaving it in the road. When the adult Dolphin Blue (Lindsay…
First published by Little White Lies, as part of my Cinema Psychotronicum column On that cold day in the park in Vancouver, well-dressed Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis) passes a bench where an unnamed Boy (Michael Burns) sits and shivers. Frances is on her way to her well-appointed parkside apartment, where she is to host a…
After a black-and-white still of a plantation house, Walter Lima Jr’s Through the Shadow (Através da Sombra) begins with intimate close-up images of Laura (Virginia Cavendish) carefully buttoning up her clothing over the skin on her chest. This sets the tone for a film that will come to be preoccupied with sexual repression and denial…
Lunacy (Sílení) first published by EyeforFIlm “Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see is a horror film, with all the degeneracy peculiar to that genre.” In case we are not aware that we are watching a film by Jan Svankmajer (Alice, Faust, Conspirators Of Pleasure, Little Otik), his fifth feature opens with the sound…
The Babadook published by Grolsch FilmWorks The Babadook opens with a fixed medium close-up of Amelia (Essie Davis), pregnant and panting in the seat of a moving car. We hear a boy’s voice cry, “Mum!” In slow motion, glass fragments suddenly fly in, and Amelia’s head jolts this way and that from an impact. She turns…