The Innocents (De uskyldige) first published by Sight and Sound, June 2022 Review: The Innocents begins with an act of casual, childish cruelty. Woken by the grunting of her older, profoundly autistic sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad) in the back of the family car, Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) pinches her sister’s leg hard – after…
Prodigy first published by SciFiNow “Children like games.” The term ‘prodigy’ is often used of young children who can beat even skilled adults at chess. Accordingly in Alex Haughey and Brian Vidal’s feature debut of the same name, chess has a prominent part, although the gamesmanship involved is used not to confer dominance, but to expose…
Carrie fist published by Little White Lies, as entry 48 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Red. I might have known it would be red.” So says Margaret White – note the colour-coded surname – a sexually repressed religious zealot (played by Piper Laurie) under whose rigidly controlling single parentage teenaged Carrie (Sissy Spacek) has been brought…
First published by EyeforFilm Filmmakers love to look back to the movies that were the bread and butter of their formative years, helping make them who they are today – and so inevitably, much as the spirit of the Seventies (along with that period’s electoral scandal, oil crises, Middle eastern terrorism, protracted wars broad) returned…
Dark Touch first published by Grolsch FilmWorks A dark and stormy night. A big old classically furnished house in the middle of nowhere. A shelf collapses, a baby cries, shadows move within, and a scream is heard. Right from its opening scene, Dark Touch uses the trappings of pure gothic (including elements of the supernatural) to…