X first published by Sight and Sound online Ti West‘s X opens with a visual trick to confound the viewer’s sense of time. A corpse-strewn farmhouse is shown in what appears to be outmoded Academy ratio, until the camera’s forward movement reveals that the vertical extremities of this squared image are in fact the sides…
The Amusement Park first published by Little White Lies Ushering in – along with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby from the same year – a new Golden Age of horror that would last throughout the following decade, George A. Romero’s 1968 feature debut Night of the Living Dead shifted horror from the gothic castle to America’s…
In Gonzalo Calzada‘s Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night (Nocturna – Lado A – La Noche del Hombre Grande, 2021), Alzheimer’s-addled nonagenarian Ulises (played by Pepe Soriano, and by Jenaro Nouet as a child) reconciled himself to half-remembered guilt, regret and loss over one long, dark night of the soul in the…
Falling first published by Movies on Weekends Falling begins with young Willis Peterson (Sverrir Gudnason) bringing his wife Gwen (Hannah Gross) and newborn John home to his farm near the small town of Boonville in upstate New York. In a private moment, as he looks down at Gwen asleep in the car and John gurgling…
Mater first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 “I’m not leaving this house. Never.” The speaker is Anka (Neva Rosic), a crafty, cancerous, cantankerous old widow who maybe knows, maybe does not, that her adult daughter Jasna (Daria Lorenci) has come all the way from her own home in Berlin to…
Poetry first published by Little White Lies There is something about blank pages – or empty screens – that demands we fill them with a bit of ourselves. This is why writer’s block has proved such a common narrative vehicle in films (think Barton Fink, Adaptation. and Swimming Pool) that deal with the creative process itself, dramatising their own imaginative…