#childs play 2019 might be the most underrated film this year

[snorinlauren]

The Best Horror Movies Streaming On Netflix Right Now

The number of digital platforms on which fans of horror movies can find a good scare is just as frightening as the films they have available to stream. In fact, there is even one that specializes in bringing the best the genre has to offer (and then some). Of course, for those who only have so much time and money at their disposal, settling on Netflix to help deliver the spooks would not be a mistake.

There are enough horror movies available on the popular platform to keep you streaming into the wee hours of the night, mainly because you will not be able to sleep. Among the many fears you would be facing during this binge with iconically creepy classics, modern masterpieces of the macabre, and even some of Netflix’s own ominous originals, one you should not have to worry about is the fear of disappointment.

That being said, we understand that some phobias are more challenging to get over than others, so allow us to be a beacon of despair and point you in the right direction of what the best horror movies currently available to stream on Netflix. We figured that 13 would be an appropriate number, starting with an influential cult favorite that arguably pioneered the “cabin in the woods” thriller.

The Evil Dead (1981)

A weekend getaway and an old cabin becomes an unrelenting nightmare for one man (Bruce Campbell) after his four friends are possessed by an ancient spirit that turns them into grotesque and cruel creatures.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Writer and director Sam Raimi became the patron saint of low budget indie horror with The Evil Dead, that remains a timeless classic of astonishing influence that spawned two campy sequels, a brilliantly brutal remake, and a hilarious TV series that serves as a perfect send-off for Bruce Campbell's chainsaw-handed hero, Ash Williams.

Stream The Evil Dead on Netflix here.

Poltergeist (1982)

A family seeks help when their youngest daughter is kidnapped by malevolent spirits that have invaded their suburban home.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: From producer Steven Spielberg and directed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre creator Tobe Hooper (well, depending on who you talk to), Poltergeist is an essential haunted house picture for how it expertly taps into traumas that people of all ages an relate to and may lead you to develop new fears as well, such as television static, perhaps.

Stream Poltergeist on Netflix here.

Child’s Play (1988)

A single mother (Catherine Hicks) enlists the aid of a homicide detective (Chris Sarandon) after discovering that the doll she bought for her young son (Alex Vincent) is possessed by the soul of a dead serial killer (Brad Dourif).

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Before there was Annabelle, there was Chucky, who may not have been the first toy responsible for giving children nightmares, but certainly became every horror fan's favorite of that kind upon the release of Child's Play, a classic slasher but pokes great fun at modern commercialism.

Stream Child's Play on Netflix here.

The Silence Of The Lambs (1991)

To catch a deranged murderer who skins his victims, ambitious FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Academy Award winner Jodie Foster) enlists Hannibal Lecter (Academy Award winner Anthony Hopkins), a former psychiatrist and notorious cannibal, to help get into the mind of a criminal.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: While the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may prefer their choice for the Best Picture Oscar in 1992 not be called "horror," with Anthony Hopkins' chilling performance and breathlessly suspenseful direction by Jonathan Demme, it is hard to imagine The Silence of the Lambs in any other category.

Stream The Silence of the Lambs on Netflix here.

Candyman (1992)

A graduate student (Virginia Madsen) investigating Chicago myths for her college thesis becomes especially interested on the story of a supernatural entity with a hook for a hand whom locals believe can be summoned by saying his name five times.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Tony Todd created quite a "buzz" in black horror history as the title character of Candyman, a creation from legendary writer Clive Barker based on the deliciously creepy concept of an urban legend whose existence depends on those who believe in him.

Stream Candyman on Netflix here.

Insidious (2011)

After their eldest son (Ty Simpkins) inexplicably falls into something even doctors hesitate to call a coma, a family (led by Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) begins to fall prey to a relentless evil that seems to follow them whenever they try to escape.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell, the dynamic duo behind Saw who have since gone onto great successes on their own, created an indelibly frightening new classic to the haunted house sub-genre with Insidious, particularly for a nearly unprecedented twist that might actually have you thankful when it keeps you up at night.

Stream Insidious on Netflix here.

Sinister (2012)

Desperate for another bestseller, a true crime writer (Ethan Hawke) moves his family into a house where a disturbing murder took place, which he plans to research for his latest masterpiece, only to learn that the truth behind the incident is much worse than he could have imagined.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Oscar-nominee Ethan Hawke became an unexpected "scream king" after playing the tragic hero of Sinister, from Doctor Strange and The Exorcism of Emily Rose director Scott Derrickson, which is, arguably, the most ferociously unsettling supernatural crime thriller ever made.

Stream Sinister on Netflix here.

Creep (2014)

An amateur filmmaker accepts a request over Craigslist to film a terminally ill man's final message to his son, but quickly comes to regret the decision when his host's progressively concerning actions lead him to question if he is the one about to expire.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Conceived by its own stars Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice (the latter of which also directs), Creep is an underrated found footage gem that mostly lives up to its name (with a almost equally haunting 2017 follow-up that is supposedly the second of a planned trilogy), but the biggest shocker is how mumblecore pioneers Duplass and Brice essentially improvised the entire story from scratch.

Stream Creep on Netflix here.

The Invitation (2015)

A man brings his girlfriend to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife and her new lover, but is immediately, and unshakably, convinced that something sinister is afoot.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: As this tenuous, high-wire act from director Karen Kusama progresses, you may not be sure who among these party guests, even Logan Marshall Green's protagonist, is worth your trust, but one thing I can confidently guarantee is is that the final moment of The Invitation will rupture your brain.

Stream The Invitation on Netflix here.

Train To Busan (2016)

An emotionally distant businessman's commute for his young daughter to visit her mother turns out to be a one-way trip into hell when someone carrying a virus turning people into mindless cannibals invites herself on board.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Not only is the live-action debut of Korean filmmaker Sang-ho Yeon’s one of the most exciting and clever zombie films in recent memory, but Train to Busan, which has spawned a highly anticipated sequel, also succeeds as a moving thriller about the sacrifices we make for ones we love.

Stream Train to Busan on Netflix here.

Terrifier (2017)

Two beautiful late night partygoers (Jenna Kanell and Catherine Corcoran) are in for the worst Halloween of their lives when they fall prey to an unfriendly clown who has plenty of sadistic trick and treats in store for them.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: If you ask me, Pennywise has nothing on Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), the future slasher icon whom the title of Terrifier appropriately refers to for his whimsically morbid imagination and tenacious blood thirst that makes director Damien Leone’s third feature a masterpiece of unapologetic shock and "ugh."

Stream Terrifier on Netflix here.

In The Tall Grass (2019)

A pregnant woman (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother (Avery Whitted) follow a young boy's cry for help into a large field of high-growing grass, but it soon it becomes apparent that there is no way out.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: Based on a novella by father/son writing duo Stephen King and Joe Hill, In the Tall Grass is a survivalist thriller with startling fantasy, engrossing mystery, and a menacing performance by "scream king" and The Conjuring star Patrick Wilson that makes this Netflix original one of the coolest surprises in horror of its year.

Stream In the Tall Grass on Netflix here.

Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil (2010)

An idyllic vacation in newly purchased cabin turns into "a real doozy of a day" for a pair of well-meaning hillbillies (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) after an awkward misunderstanding with some young campers leads to a bloodbath.

Why It's A Good Option for Horror Fans: The old slasher trope of shady country folk is turned on its head in a most brilliantly hilarious, yet uncompromisingly graphic, way in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which may prove to be perfect way to end your Netflix horror binge: with a morbid laugh.

Stream Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil on Netflix here.

What do you think? Have we captured all the best haunts on Netflix, or is the absence of your own favorite horror flick the scariest thing you saw on our list? Let us know in the comments and be sure to check back for additional information and updates on the freakiest genre in cinema, as well as even more rattling recommendations of movies and TV shows you can stream, here on CinemaBlend.

What is you favorite horror film currently available to stream on Netflix?

[jrobert1698-blog]

The Mandalorian Season One Review

The Mandalorian is a Disney+ original television show starring Pedro Pascal and created by Jon Favreau.  In addition to featuring a supporting cast of Gina Carano, Carl Weathers, and Giancarlo Esposito, the show also created a legend of our time: Baby Yoda.  Logging just eight episodes in its debut season, the show follows a conflicted bounty hunter as he attempts to honor the creed of his people, the customs of his profession, and his heart’s desire.  If you haven’t seen the show yet, I highly suggest you check it out.  Some spoilers lie ahead if you wish to turn back now; otherwise, “this is the way.”

I’ll be honest: I’m a really big Star Wars fan.  I should qualify that by saying I haven’t consumed every bit of the Star Wars canon, and I’m not extremely familiar with the Expanded Universe.  I know this qualifies me as scum; force choke me if you must.  Nonetheless, it is one of my favorite franchises dating all the way back to my early childhood.  This makes it somewhat difficult to review anything Star Wars related because I’m always subconsciously rooting for it to be good.  I allowed this to get the better of me with The Last Jedi, and I defended that film for far too long.  In short, I tried to approach The Mandalorian with an open mind but without letting my inner fanboy take over my sensibilities.  I’d like to believe that this review is as neutral as possible but if I do sound overexcited please forgive me. 

Before I get into The Mandalorian in detail I want to take a brief step back to 2015.  Before The Force Awakens cam out, everybody was excited to see Star Wars again.  Despite box office success, some people dismissed Episode VII as too derivative of A New Hope.  Others were just happy to have new characters, a diverse cast, and a competent director in J.J. Abrams.  I will go to the grave believing that the single biggest mistake Disney made since purchasing Star Wars was hiring Rian Johnson to direct The Last Jedi. While he is clearly capable of creating a great film in his own right, his vision clashed significantly with Abrams’ and the end result was a very divisive movie that split up the Star Wars fan base.  It made at least half the fandom bitter and jaded towards anything Star Wars that Disney produced.  People desperately needed something to unify them and make them remember why they love Star Wars again.  I’m happy to report that season one of The Mandalorian is exactly what the fans, and Disney, needed. 

I feel as though its only proper to begin a review of The Mandalorian by discussing Din Djarin himself as portrayed by Pedro Pascal.  I liked him in Game of Thrones and I like him even more here.  Some people might assume that having a mask cover your entire face makes acting easier.  To some extent this is true.  Not having to express emotions with one’s eyes and mouth alleviates some of the burden.  However, its also a unique acting challenge to make people get invested in a character whose face they can’t see.  The fact that so many love this character is a testament to good screenwriting and Pascal’s acting ability.  The audience actually roots for Mando to keep his mask on because the writers made it a crucial part of his identity.  Additionally, Pascal has to express emotion through the intonation of his voice, the speed at which he turns his helmet, and his deliberate pace when he walks.  This is far more difficult than people realize, and Pascal deserves a lot of credit for making this season the success that it was.

The character of the Mandalorian also stands out to me because in many ways he exemplifies the qualities of a good action hero.  Again, good screenwriting.  He comes off as a believable bad ass from the minute he slices a guy in half with a door in Episode 1.  However, unlike other Star Wars protagonists of late, he never feels overpowered either.  Audiences need to feel like their hero is in danger of getting hurt or dying in order for excitement to register.  There are many moments in this season where Mando gets his ass kicked.  He gets electrocuted by Jawas, gored by a Mudhorn, pinned down by Bounty Hunters and almost blown up several times.  However, like any good action hero, he always manages to bounce back and lives to fight another day.  This is why audiences truly respect this character who, at the end of the day, is just a human being like all of us. 

Another great, and perhaps underrated, aspect of this show is the amazing score by Ludwig Goransson.  I really liked his work on Black Panther as well and I’m looking forward to any future projects he works on.  This is the first time I can remember that anyone other than John Williams has made an original and memorable Star Wars score.  The main title is freakin’ awesome.  It’s the perfect blend of tribal mysticism and the military marches we’ve come to know and love.  Fortunately, this space opera comes with some great overtures to highlight it.

Before I sound like a total fanboy, let’s talk about a few issues I have with the show.  There are certainly issues you can nitpick from a canon perspective but that isn’t my main concern.  My biggest complaint would be the sometimes haphazard nature of the show.  Episode 5 in particular felt like a sizable departure from the main story.  Episode 6, while more entertaining, similarly broke from the overarching narrative to give us a little bit of Mando’s backstory.  I don’t necessarily have a problem with this video game mission approach to the show, but I do hope that some of these side quests get paid off more significantly in future episodes.  I also would have liked a more consistent emphasis on the supporting cast members like Carano’s Cara Dune and Weathers’ Greef Carga.  Even Kuill could have used more screen time if for no other purpose than to make us more attached to him before his untimely death.

My complaints, in the long run, are relatively minor.  Compared to my overall respect and enjoyment of this show, they pale in comparison.  One major reason why is that Disney spared no expense in making this show the best it could possibly be.  The visual effects, where I feared they might skimp, were better than a lot of feature films.  The show felt cinematic, like Game of Thrones did at its best.  The cinematography was mostly great as well.  I particularly liked Taika Waititi’s direction in the season finale.  That shot of Mando finally using a jetpack to latch onto Moff Gideon’s TIE Fighter deserves to be on a poster.  I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention the closing shot of Gideon holding the fucking Darksaber.  I can’t wait to see Giancarlo Esposito in an expanded role in Season 2 and hopefully beyond.  If he can play half the villain he did in Breaking Bad it will be a success.

And, of course, I had to save the single best part of this show, by far, for last. Baby. Fucking. Yoda.  This is one of the most well-concealed plot twists in recent memory.  Disney, somehow, did a fantastic job of keeping Baby Yoda out of marketing materials and trailers in the pre-release process.  When I first saw that adorable green face for the first time I somehow screamed, laughed and cried out in excitement at once.  This character is great for so many reasons besides obviously being the cutest thing to come out of 2019.  The Child makes Mando extremely conflicted and puts him in the most difficult quandary of his life: honor his code as a Bounty Hunter or follow his instincts and protect this child in need?  Baby Yoda also kicks a lot of ass for a one-foot-tall fifty year old.  His obviously strong connection to the force presents a myriad of options for his future: will he train as a Jedi, be a powerful vigilante, or turn to the dark side?  I’m kidding, but I’m also serious; he did force choke Cara Dune after all.  And he’s grown up among a series of explosions, laser beams, and punchy storm troopers.  That’s a pretty traumatic childhood.  Clearly, Baby Yoda has turned into a phenomenon and sparked an infinite number of memes, songs, and art.  I think it’s well deserved and I can’t wait to see more adventures in baby sitting with our little green friend. 

My thoughts on The Mandalorian can be expressed very simply: it’s fucking awesome. There is a whole lot to like about where this story is going and what Favreau and the slew of directors have done so far.  They’ve managed to inject genuine excitement into the fan base for what feels like the first time in a very, very long time. Additionally, Disney needed to knock one out of the park in order to salvage their reputation and preserve fan interest in one of their most valuable franchises.  Despite a few minor missteps, season one of The Mandalorian is a fantastic and I eagerly anticipate season two whenever it comes out.  If you haven’t seen it yet, go check it out.  Baby Yoda alone makes it worth it.  I have spoken.

Rating: 9/10

[ramajmedia]

10 Of The Most Iconic Jim Henson Creatures (That Aren't Muppets), Ranked

Most of us are familiar with the genius of Jim Henson, whether from The Muppets, Sesame Street, or any number of his films. The famous puppeteer and creator certainly had a gift for creating memorable and visually stunning characters. So much so, in fact, that an entire workshop was created dedicated to the production of some of these famous creatures.

RELATED:

Classic shows like The Storyteller and Fraggle Rock (and movies like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal) owe everything to this visionary. Some of their most wonderful creations were all conceived in Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Today, we're having a creature feature as we spend some time with ten of the Jim Henson Company's greatest creature creations. Oh, and don't worry: as you can see, we haven't forgotten the Muppets; they've been ranked separately!

10 Bear in the Big Blue House

We'll start our list with a howdy from the big bear himself, Bear from Bear in the Big Blue House. One of the largest creatures created by Henson's company (along with characters like Sweetums), Bear was the warm and inviting star of his own show. It aired on the Disney Channel in the 90s.

In the mornings, Bear would welcome viewers into the titular Big Blue House for a day with all his friends, such as Treelo, Ocho, Pip and Pop Otter, Shadow, and Luna the Moon. Bear was as big and warm as his personality, and he always made his viewers feel welcome. What better way to start out our list?

9 Rankle, Rose, and Edgar

What do a reanimated cat mummy, a zombie raccoon, and a werewolf with a sweet tooth have in common? They are all friends of the quirky and charming Christine McConnell. These three are certainly some of the more adult characters the company has created, but at the same time, they are as charming as any Muppet or other creation.

RELATED: Sesame Street: 10 Best Celebrity Guest Stars Of The Last 50 Years, Ranked

Brought to us by Henson Alternative, Rankle, Rose, and Edgar are easily the highlights of the show. Rankle is snarky, sarcastic, and mildly sinister, Rose is bawdy and loud, and Edgar is a teddy bear with a horror-movie-quality exterior. What's not to love?

8 The Sinclair Family

Created in memory of the famous Muppet-maker, Dinosaurs was a sitcom that centered around the prehistoric happenings of the Sinclair family. For four seasons, viewers tuned in to the lives of Earl, Fran, Robbie, Charlene, and their hatchling, Baby Sinclair. The show was a weird but wonderful combination of creatures and comedy that had quite the following.

Despite its use of creatures, the sitcom jumped through all the genre hoops in the way of Family Matters, Full House, and Boy Meets World. It had the family-centric narrative, but also tackled some interesting issues, including a controversial season finale. It was a strange show, but certainly one we can appreciate.

7 Gelflings (2019 Version)

The Dark Crystal is arguably one of Jim Henson's greatest creations; essentially his Lord of the Rings. As much as we wanted to include Jen and Kira from the original film, the prize has to go to the newer Gelflings featured in the new Netflix series.

The Gelflings, as their name might allude, are elf-like creatures from the land of Thra. In Age of Resistance, there are even tribes of them somewhat akin to the elves of Tolkien. Rian, Brea, and Deet are three of the new Gelflings, and they could not look better. They have better puppet models, a more high-fantasy design, and their different personae are absolutely enchanting. Color us impressed.

6 Skeksis

On the other end of the Dark Crystal spectrum, we have the sinister and insidious Skeksis. This breed of nightmare fuel is quite possibly the most horrifying thing Henson ever dreamed up. With their beaks, claws, teeth, and aristocratic sense of style, there's definitely something outright evil about their persona.

From the snarling Emporer Skeksi to the creepily charming Chamberlain, the Skeksis have ruled Thra with an iron claw, bewitching and deceiving their world to their whims. They are truly as hideous on the outside as they are within, but we still love watching them. They're easily one of our favorite monsters.

5 Creatures of the Labyrinth

Though we have a soft spot for Sir Didymus, we couldn't pick just one creature for this spot. For those who haven't seen this marvelously magical film, Labyrinth is Jim Henson's collaboration with the legendary David Bowie, which resulted in one of the most iconic fantasy films of the 80s.

RELATED: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Labyrinth

Jareth, Hoggle, Ludo, and all the legions of monsters that inhabit this mystical magical world were just too many to count. Worthy of a list all their own, the creatures from the titular labyrinth could rival those of Dark Crystal fame, but we'd be lying if we said Bowie didn't give them an unfair advantage.

4 The Fraggles

Dance your cares away and let the music play, down in Fraggle Rock with these colorful creatures. The Fraggles are small, carefree critters who, along with the workaholic Doozers, live their lives and go on adventures in the caves of Fraggle Rock.

RELATED: 10 Most Underrated Jim Henson Creations

Gobo, Mokey, Wembley, Boober, and Red are just the starring cast of Fraggle Rock, but there are legions more of the fuzzy creatures living beneath the home of Doc and his dog, Sprocket. These lovable creatures are some of Jim Henson's most memorable characters, and we can see why. Much more than Muppets, the Fraggles delighted kids for five seasons and 96 episodes.

3 Aughra

Frank Oz couldn't have put it better any other way: she's so ugly she's beautiful. Yes, we've mentioned the rest of the Dark Crystal characters already, but we can't leave out Aughra. Aughra is one of the most powerful beings in the realm of Thra, as well as one of the most uniquely-designed creatures the Creature Shop has ever created.

Born from the rocks before even the race of Gelflings, Aughra is the only one of her kind. She's a mystic, a wizard, and a cosmic being all rolled into one. As one of the most strange and mystifying creatures on our list, you can bet we applauded her return in Age of Resistance. 

2 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Bringing Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michaelangelo to the big screen outside of animation was no easy feat. Enter Jim Henson's Creature Shop to bring them to life. Using a mix of puppetry and full-body effects, the turtles sprang from the sewers and onto the big screen for the very first time.

Though the characters themselves were not created by Henson or his crew, the technology to bring them to life was. This led to the creation of the Henson Performance Control System, which revolutionized puppeteering and practical effects. If it wasn't for this film, who knows where the creature shop would be.

1 Big Bird

Arguably the most famous resident of Sesame Street, Big Bird has entertained legions of children and even adults since he first appeared in 1969. The large yellow avian has represented every curious child to ever tune in to the popular PBS program, teaching them the value of imagination and an appetite for learning.

From his bright, yellow, fluffy exterior to his enormous heart, Big Bird has delighted millions of viewers the world over. Though not a product of the Creature Shop, without Big Bird there might not even be a Sesame Street. Adorable, curious, and even a trendsetter, how could we not give the big guy our number one spot?

NEXT: Sesame Street: 10 Hilarious (And Adorable) Bert And Ernie Memes

source https://screenrant.com/jim-henson-most-iconic-creatures-besides-muppets/

[nitrateglow]

Halloween 2019 marathon: 16

Werewolf of London (dir. Stuart Walker, 1935)

The Ur-werewolf sound film, Werewolf of London was Universal’s initial attempt to tap into werewolf lore. Unfortunately at the time, the movie was not a success. Fortunately, we ended up getting Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf-man five years later, but this is still an interesting movie, even if it isn’t as good as the later picture.

The lead character Wilfred Glendon is a scientist who gets attacked by a werewolf during a trip to Tibet. Of course, this leads to him transforming at night and prowling upon helpless civilians. In this movie, werewolves also prey upon what they love most-- in this case, it’s Wilfred’s wife Lisa (played by Valerie Hobson, who also featured in Bride of Frankenstein as Elizabeth that same year).

Wilfred is an interesting character in that he’s a bit of an arrogant jerk. He condescends to the people around him and treats his wife like she’s a burden. When he claims she is the one person he loves most, you have a hard time believing him.

I would have called that a flaw... but then I read Tim Brayton’s review and he pointed out something I had not considered:

The film makes a point of clarifying that werewolves instinctively desire to destroy what they love most in human life, but there's enough meanness to Hull's Glendon that there's a little tension underlying his savagery, like he's almost eager, Hyde-style, to go do the wickedness that he can't as a moral man. And that, in turn, deepens his character arc throughout the slender but impressively dense 75-minute feature: the film tracks Glendon's commitment to besting his smug, nasty self, not just taming the animal within.

This interpretation makes me think of Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s The Shining, how his anger and hate for his wife and child were only fully unleashed by the forces in the hotel. Nothing he did was the result of the ghosts-- they only gave a push to what was already there. The idea that Wilfred might deep down want to destroy Lisa is fascinating and far more disturbing than if he really did just think she was the bee’s knees.

Anytime he says he loves Lisa, Wilfred seems to be trying to convince himself of this as much as anyone else. The one on-the-mouth kiss the two share might be one of the most awkward kisses in cinema: he smashes his face into hers and she just stands there, receiving it without reciprocating. Even on his end, there is no passion, more desperation that he wants something to be there. Considering the subplot with Lisa’s old flame returning for a visit, one has to wonder what brought Lisa and Wilfred together in the first place.

Overall, this is an interesting take on werewolf lore. I prefer The Wolf Man for its atmosphere and characters, but this is an underrated gem. If you love classic horror, then you’ll get a kick out of this.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Supermilk Interview: Less Spikes, More Curves

Photo by Julie Ernie

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Jake Popyura’s used to doing things himself. The drummer and vocalist of supremely underrated British indie rock band Doe, who split up in 2019, records as Supermilk, a project initially intended to be a studio-only side project, albeit one rooted in Popyura’s longtime experience self-recording. A 2017 and 2019 EP were followed by a full-length, last March’s Death Is The Best Thing for You Now, which he finally planned to tour, adopting his bedroom approach to a band on stage. We all know what happened last March. For Popyura, the cancellation of live music for the foreseeable future, the still-recent dissolution of Doe, and a dry well of freelance web development projects (his day gig) could have combined to form a full-blown existential crisis. Yes, who am I to assume that didn’t happen, but from an outsider’s point of view, Popyura simply did what a lot of artists did with lockdown: write some songs.

Four by Three, Supermilk’s second LP (and first for Specialist Subject) marks a new path for Popyura both in context of Doe and Supermilk. Though there are still buzzing tunes with grim subject matter, Popyura took the opportunity to dive deep within himself. The album’s bookended with two lilting, personal tracks, first single and closer “Used to It” and vulnerable opener “Unsafe”. The latter as well as “Lifesaver” allow him to showcase his expressive, open vocals, giving more space than ever to his lyrics. Yes, some of the album’s best songs could have fit on previous, murder-oriented releases, like choppy, Heaven’s Gate-inspired burner “Swim” and a fuzz rock sequel to Death’s serial killer tale “Agony Anne”. But Four by Three has the most variety of any Supermilk or even Doe release, exemplary of Popyura’s ability to channel different corners of his mind.

I spoke with Popyura over Zoom in May from London, where he’s “currently living, trying not to go insane.” In addition to the record, he spoke about his love for horror films, craft beer, and VHS collecting, why he chooses to be open about his day job, and when he’ll start thinking about restarting the live incarnation of Supermilk. Read the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: With either Doe or Supermilk, had you been used to the idea of putting out an album, touring it, and having that road-testing experience influence the process of the next one? Was the process for Four by Three different, having written and recorded it immediately after putting out Death Is The Best Thing for You Now?

Jake Popyura: I guess with Doe, that was the way they would usually work, in terms of touring it for as long as we could before getting started on another one. Naturally, the way you evolve as a band is through playing and touring relentlessly, and the adventures you have together influence the way you work together and impact subsequent releases. With Supermilk, I’ve been doing my own kind of “one man band” things for a long time. I’m an only child and started playing music really early, and my dad taught me to record music by myself on his four-track when I was quite young. Supermilk’s sort of another version of that one-man band thing. I’ve never really played live as a solo thing. Not having any outside influence, just doing it myself without having road testing, is something I’m used to, so it didn’t make much of a difference to the writing and recording of the new record.

The last record, my first full-length with Supermilk, we were working on a live band incarnation of it, which we were gonna tour and do some shows with. That had to be completely canceled because of COVID. That was the only hint of doing live stuff solo. It’s always been a self-contained thing, writing and recording on my own. The only difference this time is my friend Rich [Mandell] produced, mixed, and mastered Four by Three. So sadly, no road testing for Supermilk yet. Hopefully at some point in the future when we can stand shoulder to shoulder and people can be on stage again.

There was a period of time last year where I didn’t work, because I was previously freelance as a day job. I finished my last freelance contract just before COVID kicked off, and all the work dried up, and there were four months I couldn’t work or couldn’t find any work. It was all a bit dicey. So I thought, “I guess I’ll start [making a record.]” I was playing guitar a lot more and was indoors a lot more. It was a way to pass the time and naturally grew into intelligent songs. Towards the end of the year, I thought, “There might be a second record in this. I like all the stuff I’m doing, and there’s probably enough ideas in here for me to start forming it into a second album.” So it was almost accidentally born out of the situation.

SILY: How would you say it’s distinct from the first record?

JP: I’d say the first record is a lot more agitated, if that makes sense. It had a theme where a lot of the songs were about death and entitlement and the combination of death as a result of entitlement. Even though there were a lot of pop songs on it, it was bleak, angry, and fidgety. The fact that I recorded it by myself made it rough around the edges. This second one ended up being gentler, in a way, which was not intentional at all. But maybe it was because I was in a slightly different place from when I wrote the first one. 

I have a wide rage of influences. I grew up listening to a lot of punk and hardcore and still have a love of heavy, fast music and post-punk. Stuff like Devo, B-52s. There’s also a lot of gentle, ambient stuff that I love, and I don’t get a chance to or think to write in that style. Naturally, I ended up writing quite a few more personal, gentle, acoustic songs as well. The first time I’ve really kind of used acoustic [guitar] on any Supermilk stuff.

Nicola [Leel] from Doe, I’m looking after her acoustic guitar while she’s living in the States, and I ended up writing a lot of the songs on that, which helped me play around with full open chords that were jammy and gentle, instead of playing through fuzz pedals all the time. It’s got less spikes and more curves. A bit smoother around the edges. And the lyrics are a lot more personal too, referencing things going on in my life over the last year and a bit.

SILY: You still find room for both the gentler/more personal and the more raw. The former is immediately apparent on the opening track, “Unsafe”, but you still have sharp barbs of guitar on the second and third track, and “Fears” is really fuzzy. Then “Lifesaver” goes back to gentle. Did you try to sequence the album in a way that goes back and forth between different levels of noise?

JP: I’m always quite fussy about the track sequencing. Not so much anymore, but I used to have a thing where I couldn’t have songs together that were the exact same tempo or key. Then I realized that sometimes works against you, because it’s sometimes nice to have two songs in the same key that flow into each other. I used to be way more anal about that. I never write an album in sequence, but ones the songs are mixed, I spend a while putting them into different orders.

SILY: The song “Used To It” is a great closer, but you rarely see the closer issued as the first single. Why did you release it as the first taste of the record?

JP: The first single was really “Pelican Pete”, but we put it out with Specialist Subject before we announced the record because we were keen to get something out there. But with “Used To It”, it’s the most different compared to what I’ve done before. I really liked the idea of putting out a track that wasn’t entirely consistent with what I had done before. It’s one of the more personal songs on the record, too. It weaves a bit of a story and hits a few different places and notes than singles I had put out previously. It’s more chill and gentle. The most downtempo thing I’ve done. I thought it would be interesting instead of releasing the standard guitar ones to let people know, “Here’s something from the record you might not like, just to give you a heads up.”

SILY: Who or what is Pelican Pete?

JP: There’s a song on the first record called “Agony Anne”, a loose story of a serial killer called Anne who meets her victims through Tinder, or “insert name of dating app here.” The story is from the perspective of her soon-to-be victim, and in an attempt to spare their life, they say, “Hang on a second: You must be very lonely doing all this killing on your own. Maybe I can be the person to do this with you. You can spare my life and we can do this together and form a partnership.” “Pelican Pete” is the sequel to that song, and Pete is the person from “Agony Anne”. “Pelican Pete” is from the perspective of Anne, her saying, “This was a bad idea. You’ve gone rogue and are not abiding by my code. You’re gonna get us caught. I’m gonna have to kill you.”

SILY: That’s not a personal story, is it?

JP: I hope not, unless it’s channeling some sort of other life. On the whole, this album is a lot more personal and gentler than the first one, but there are still a few songs on here dealing with death. It would be unusual if there weren’t any songs like that on here, especially considering the time in which I wrote it, where there was a lot of death around us and gnarly shit happening. Also, I’m a big horror fan and have always been fascinated with the slightly more macabre side of things and weird interpersonal relationships that tie into those things as well. Especially when you have a pair of serial killers. It’s interesting to me, this love affair and bond can be tied up in such a sadistic way.

There’s a song on here loosely based on the Heaven’s Gate cult, which I’m also quite fascinated with. So I’d never allow myself to write a completely gentle album, even though it’s more gentle on the whole and definitely shows a softer side. But a big component of my personality remains in the uncomfortable, slightly infatuated with death arena, so it felt right to include those in there too.

SILY: You repeat “You will not be safe” on the first track. Does that go along with the macabre themes?

JP: Not really, actually. One through-line in a lot of the stuff I’ve written is about mental health and my own struggles with mental illness. That song’s more about the fear I have that all of my friends are one day gonna get up and say, “Why have we been friends with this person for so long?” When I actually speak to my other friends or people in general who suffer from generalized anxiety that comes with several different types of mental illness, that kind of fear that someone wakes up and realizes I’m a terrible person, is a common feeling that a lot of people have. “You will not be safe” and the line before that, “Some day you’ll believe me / Some day you’ll release me,” it’s some day you’ll believe me when I keep telling you I’m a piece of shit and not worth it. “You will not be safe” is like, “I’ll still be there--the stain of our friendship will still be on your life.” 

It sounds bleak, but I find this stuff quite funny as well. You’ve got to laugh about your own mental peculiarities. I find them amusing when talking to someone else about them. They’re just floating in my head, so me talking out loud about them is funny. [laughs]

SILY: What’s the purpose of the interlude, “Hale Bopp”, within the narrative of the record?

JP: That’s a portion of a song I made 10-11 years ago. I made a chiptune-esque project that was Nintendo-style bleeps and bloops, emulating a rock band sound made entirely in the computer. It’s a portion of that, been fucked with a little bit, pitch shifted and reversed. “The Skin”, the song I mentioned about Heaven’s Gate, is almost a fictionalized version of it from the point of view of the two last people standing in a suicide cult/pact, looking back over the events that have led up to that point and realizing they’ve got a choice to make. Hale-Bopp was the comet they believed [would transport them] if they took their own lives, if they timed it right and left their own “vehicles”, which is how they referred to their human bodies, that they’d be able to ride the comet back to their alien origins and join the people they left previously. [The song] sounds a bit spacey, and you can listen to that and imagine a bunch of people jumping to a comet and riding back to where they think they come from. Because of the way it’s been reversed and pitch-shifted, it feels melodic and hopeful but sad and tragic at the same time, which is fitting with the themes.

SILY: Are you a fan of contemporary horror films?

JP: I’m a fan of horror all across the decades. I usually reference 80′s horror because the style of it--when effects were starting to be used a lot more and there wasn’t quite as much CGI yet, so there was a gritty feel to the stuff that was happening even thought it was fake, because it was happening in the studio in frame with the actors. Including the gore or creature effects. It forced people to get creative. There’s something special and magical about watching that happen and how it’s captured by the filmmakers. But I’m a big fan of the genre on the whole.

SILY: You’ve shared in your bio that you’re also interested in craft brewing and that you have a day job as a web developer. I normally don’t see bands or band members including that in conjunction with information about the album. Why did you choose to share these things about yourself, whether they pertain to the music or not?

JP: I feel like the vast majority of my friends are musicians, or if not musicians, are involved in the arts in some way. I know one or two people who do music as their job. The eternal struggle, trying to find that right balance--especially if you’re doing music on a small indie level--you can have a fan base and people buying your music and big sold out shows and be established--but there’s still a good chance it’s not gonna be your living. Almost everyone I know subsidizes it with a day job. I thought it would be a nice thing to throw in there because it’s something to be proud of, too. The way most people I know do music, it’s essentially a job even though they don’t get paid for it. They dedicate just as much time to it and put just as much effort into it and care just as much about it than any other job, if not more so. Sometimes I feel like people are ashamed to say they don’t do music full time and can’t call it their job if not making a full-time living from it. It’s nice to get rid of that stigma and say, “We’re all in this together.” We all have to take other jobs we don’t like 100%. It’s good to be honest about it.

The homebrewing was just something to amuse myself. It made me laugh. It read almost like a dating profile or something. [laughs] I actually had another line in there I chose to take out, which is, “His best feature is his butt.” I don’t need to rub the fact that I’ve got a fantastic butt in people’s faces. They’ll figure that out.

SILY: What style of beer do you brew?

JP: I’m actually drinking one right now. I’ve just brewed a very nice stout, about 5.5%. Some nice chocolate, licoricey notes. Chocolate malt and roasted barley. I didn’t actually start brewing that long ago, but...I feel comfortable building my own recipes, putting in different yeasts, etc. There are a couple recipes I go to now that are my own that I can brew very quickly.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?

JP: I’m a VHS collector, which is supremely nerdy and very uncool. It’s funny, because in the VHS collecting community, there’s a running joke that hipsters are ruining the hobby because they’re making them too cool. Everybody just wants to buy these rare tapes and take pictures of them just to show off. It’s full of grumpy old guys. It’s such an uncool thing and clunky, redundant bit of technology that any self-respecting hipster probably wouldn’t be caught dead with VHS tapes. Regardless, I’m a big fan, and it lends itself to horror as a genre. They go hand in hand with the way a lot of people discovered horror for the first time, renting movies when they were kids. There’s something about the low-grade, crappy standard definition that lends itself to the grubby, slightly seedy nature of watching an old school horror movie, with scan lines and flickers and dodgy special effects. As a horror fan, it’s a match made in heaven. A lot of the tapes I have, there’s a series of movies colloquially known as the “video nasties.” In the 80′s, they were banned because the conservative government at the time whipped up a big moral panic about violent video tapes corrupting our nation’s youth. Evil Dead, and I Spit On Your Grave. Quite revered movies. Blood Feast. They ended up prosecuted in the UK. Video dealers were raided and their videos confiscated and burned. I’ve got some of the original tapes, and they’re highly sought after now.

This is a very long-winded tangent, but Four by Three is the aspect ratio of VHS. I called it that to loosely describe what the album was about in a nutshell to someone. Mostly from a personal place that follows my journey through the last year of things that have happened to me through the backdrop of the pandemic. The story follows a bit of a timeline, of the pandemic breaking out. One thing that kept me on the sane side at times was shutting myself away and getting very nerdy about this hobby. I had these online friendships to get nerdy about this specific thing, trading tapes and such. It helped take my mind off the absolute shitshow happening around us all. Gave me something to be excited and passionate about. That’s why the record [cover] is a video with tape being loaded into it.

SILY: Do you have any plans to play live?

JP: Not at the moment. I’ve got a lot of friends who have started booking shows already. Doe split up just prior to the pandemic, but if we were still a band, we’d probably be cautiously booking shows. But since Supermilk was never really a band, even though we formed something and had intentions of playing and touring, because it never came to proper fruition, it seems like there’s not as much pressure. It still is my thing, since I call the shots and play all the instruments. If you just want to write music and don’t fancy playing live, there’s not yet the expectation of you that you have to do that. Even though it’s very frustrating we can’t play music yet, and people have been put in a really difficult position and lost their livelihoods, it’s also been refreshing to know that people are able to create music without feeling the need to tour behind a record.

I think it will happen at some point, but I’m not making plans for now. I’m gonna enjoy the record coming out knowing I don’t need to worry too much about playing live for a little bit. When things are even more stable than they are at the moment...I think I want to stand back and watch from afar for a bit, and see what shows look like. Definitely at some point in the next 15 years.

SILY: Anything else next for you in the short or long term?

JP: I’m probably gonna watch some Netflix in a bit. Go to sleep, maybe. Eat a sandwich. Not at the same time.

I’m always writing songs. Whether those go into a pile I’ll use at some point, or whether I feel like I need to record a full-blown demo, I’ll never not be doing that, even if just purely for my own enjoyment and satisfaction. The fact that a few people might hear it is a bonus on top of that.

Continuing to be grateful I get to make music and that I’m alive.

SILY: Anything in particular you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately?

JP: There are two records in particular that came out this year that I really love that I’m finding any opportunity to plug. There’s a band called Fake Fruit that put out a self-titled record earlier this year. They’re from Oakland. They’re snarky post-punk. Every track on it is an absolute banger, exactly the kind of album I wanted to hear this year. There are bits and pieces of it that remind me of Bodega a bit, and that kind of end of post-punk with wry humor and slight wink-wink-nudge-nudge lyrics. The other record is Mr. Goblin’s Four People in an Elevator and One of Them is the Devil.  

I just started watching the Son of Sam documentary on Netflix [The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness], which is very good. Since I’ve been a small child, I’ve been a true crime, morbid weirdness fan. The only thing I’m annoyed about now is that it’s cool and a commodity. It’s widely accepted and great, but I miss telling people I’m into it and them looking at me in disgust. Gory horror movies still have that edge, where people say, “What’s wrong with you?”

[wazafam]

Despite blockbuster movies getting sequels all the time, whether it’s the upcoming Venom: Let There Be Carnage or the ninth entry in the Fast & Furious franchise, it’s rare to see indie films get the same treatment. Sometimes it’s for the best, as movies like American Beauty don’t exactly scream franchise material. But there have been some great ones in the past, whether it’s Clerks 2, the follow up to Kevin Smith’s cult classic, or Before Sunset, the sequel to the postmodern romance Before Sunrise.

RELATED: 10 Most Underrated Indie Films From The Past 5 Years

Sequels to indie movies are like gold dust, but the lack of them isn’t because the directors don’t want to make them, and there are actually a handful of filmmakers who would kill to follow up their beloved cult classics. However, whether it's due to lack of fan demand or not having the right story, the sequels are yet to be seen.

10 Jon Favreau - Swingers (1996)

Swingers isn’t just what put both Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughan on the map, but it’s one of Favreau’s best movies too. Having starred in, written, and directed the movie, Favreau has gone on to become one of the most sought-after creators in Hollywood, having directed two billion-dollar grossing movies for Disney.

So going back and following up a movie that had a micro-budget of $200,000 seems unlikely, but he has always thought about what the next chapter would be. The director has said the only reason he hasn’t yet pulled the trigger on going forward with a sequel is because he doesn’t want to potentially ruin the original with an underwhelming follow up.

9 Jordan Peele - Us (2019)

After having his own hugely popular sketch show, Jordan Peele surprisingly became a horror movie auteur. He first found success with the Academy Award winning Get Out, and then with the doppelgänger thriller Us. Though the director doesn’t want to make a sequel for Get Out, he has different intentions when it comes to Us.

The director doesn’t just want to make a sequel, but a whole Us universe. As the movie was left open ended with some loose ends, Peele explained that he has a whole mythology planned out that ties up everything, but how much of that audiences will see is anyone’s guess.

8 Quentin Tarantino - Reservoir Dogs (1992) / Pulp Fiction (1994)

Fans argue back and forth about which of the two is Quentin Tarantino’s best movie all the time, but there’s no denying that his first two movies, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, are two of his best. The beloved director has been wanting to shoot a sequel to both of them for years, and it’d be a crossover movie.

RELATED: The 10 Best Quentin Tarantino Films Of All Time (According To IMDb)

The planned sequel would have seen Vincent from Pulp Fiction and Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs on a wild weekend together in Amsterdam, of all places. However, how likely a sequel is to happen now given that it’s almost 30 years since Reservoir Dogs was first released is a mystery.

7 Greta Gerwig - Lady Bird (2017)

With Lady Bird being set in director Greta Gerwig’s hometown of Sacramento, the filmmaker has said she is not done making films about the town. However, the sequel might not follow the titular character, as Gerwig told Vanity Fair that the follow-up is intended to be more like a “spiritual” sequel then anything. But Lady Bird may appear at some point, as the director expressed that she doesn’t want to direct just one sequel, but three of them.

6 Nicholas Winding Refn - Drive (2011)

When discussing the possibility of a sequel to the ultra violent neo-noir movie Drive, director Nicholas Winding Refn has been pretty inconsistent in what he’s told reporters. In the past he has said that there’ll never be a sequel, that he’d love to make more stories surrounding the nameless protagonist, and that he wants to make a spin-off in which the driver will appear. But considering how the movie is based on the novel of the same name, the author has written a sequel, so a another adaptation in movie form is long overdue.

5 Bong Joon-ho - Parasite (2019)

Bong Joon-ho has has an incredibly productive past couple of years. The director has written not just one, but two screenplays over the past year, and he heavily alludes to one of them being a sequel to the Best Picture Academy Award winner, saying that it’s “located in Seoul and has unique elements of horror and action." Given how horrifying Parasite is, it’s hard to imagine how gloriously terrifying the sequel could possibly be.

4 Wes Anderson - Rushmore (1998) / Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Being an auteur in many different ways, whether it’s due to his perfectly symmetrical film style or always working with the same cast of actors, Wes Anderson has never shot a sequel to any of his movies. But in a Q&A his peer, Richard Linklater, Anderson explored the idea of making a sequel to Rushmore, which is widely considered his best movie. Rushmore follows a child-genius as he navigates his way through growing up in a prep school whilst being in a love triangle with two of his teachers.

RELATED: 10 Micro-Budget Indie Movies Starring Famous Actors

Given that the character is 15 years old, a sequel this many years later could brilliantly explore the character’s life at middle age. But in the same Q&A, the director talked about making a sequel to Darjeeling Limited too, and though the film isn’t quite as celebrated as Rushmore, it’s Anderson’s most underrated movie.

3 Lulu Wang - The Farewell (2019)

Though it’s very likely that she’s joking, director Lulu Wang hinted at a sequel to the incredible bilingual comedy drama in a tweet. As The Farewell is all about Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao,) who doesn’t have long left to live, and her relationship with her granddaughter Billie, the tweet suggested that the relationship could be explored further. Wang hilariously tweeted a photo of Zhao with Robert Pattinson, alluding to the possibility of Nai Nai having found Billie a husband.

2 The Coen Brothers - Barton Fink (1991)

The Coen brothers have a ton of movies under their belts, and they’ve reinvented genres so many times in the past, whether it’s the thriller with Fargo or the western with No Country For Old Men. But because the directing duo are always pushing the envelope, that means they’re never looking back, so it’s unlikely that fans will ever see sequels to their beloved hits like The Big Lebowski.

However, there is one sequel that the brothers want to shoot, and that’s Barton Fink 2. They even have a name for it already, Old Fink, and it seems like the only reason they haven’t shot it yet is because they’re waiting until John Turturro, who plays the titular character, is old enough. But considering the movie is now 30 years old, it’ll have to happen soon.

1 Richard Kelly - Donnie Darko (2001)

There has already been one sequel to Donnie Darko, which was called S. Darko and followed Donnie’s sister Samantha in a similar storyline. But the film was universally hated and had none of the returning cast or crew of the original.

The writer and director of the original movie, Richard Kelly, had nothing to do with it, but he has recently been talking about how much he wants to work on a proper sequel. Though the movie was originally a giant box-office bomb, it has become a cult hit, and the idea of a proper follow-up would send fans into a frenzy, especially as it’s coming from the original creator.

NEXT: The 10 Highest-Grossing Independent Films Of All Time

Donnie Darko & 9 Other Indie Movies Whose Directors Want To Make Sequels from https://ift.tt/3v7AeNf

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A24 Horror Movies Ranked From Worst to Best

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It is arguable that no studio, distributor, or production company has had a greater impact on the horror genre in the last decade than A24. While Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions might also lay claim to that legacy, the remarkable thing about A24 is the company lacks a particular house style or formula for its filmmaker-driven indie releases. And yet the words “A24 horror movie” call to mind words like weird, offbeat, and unsettling. They’re frequently slow-boiling, and almost always greeted with reviews celebrating high-quality.

Every A24 horror movie is distinct, but they nevertheless claim a mystique which in less than 10 years has helped some critics make the dubious claim that the 2010s were “the decade of elevated horror.” We personally don’t subscribe to the theory that horror is a caste system of “elevated” vintages vs. cheaper swill. However, we are ecstatic A24 and other companies have provided unique voices the ability to reveal profoundly artful interpretations of cinematic dread. For that reason, we’re celebrating the indie tastemakers by ranking their very best (and sometimes not-so-great) thrillers and chillers.

So sit back and join us for a list voted on by our critics and horror aficionados.

18. Tusk (2014)

We begin our countdown with the rare A24 horror movie that comes not from a new perspective, but an old, one-time favorite. A defining voice in comedy and indie filmmaking during the ‘90s, Kevin Smith drifted away from studios by the beginning of the 2010s in favor of trying his hand at horror. I wish I could say the results were better than Tusk, yet this dispiriting attempt at body horror might be the high-point of his latter day monster movies.

Read more

Movies

Why Kevin Smith’s Superman Lives Was Ahead of Its Time

By Mike Cecchini

Originally constructed as a joke on Smith’s Smodcast podcast, the finished film is every bit as listless and rambling as a weed-fueled diatribe. Not that the movie is lacking in talent. Justin Long makes an appropriately smarmy podcaster named Wallace Bryton who’s travelled to Canada to find oddballs to interview and mock, but gets more than he bargained for when he winds up in the home of Howard Howe (Michael Parks). Ever the scenery-chewer, Parks gives more gravitas to the material than it deserves as a shut-in obsessed with recreating from a human subject the walrus which saved his life one snowy night following a shipwreck. The subsequent makeup effects are grotesque, but the movie stumbles over their reveals like a standup comedian who’s forgotten the punchlines.

It’s a bizarre and repellent narrative, and can’t even be saved by Johnny Depp’s admittedly amusing French-Canadian accent and Peter Sellers-eque transformation as a late arriving police detective. – David Crow

17. Slice (2018)

Austin Vesely’s Slice plays like the pilot of a potential television series. This isn’t because when it’s over you wish there was more, but that the film is so muddled in its narrative threads that you’re sure it was cancelled before more talent could be wasted. It’s a shame because conceptually there is a lot of appeal in Slice’s setup. As a horror-comedy about a small town where ghosts walk among the living as second class citizens, witches are pushy real estate developers, and the local werewolf is a misjudged Chinese food-delivering vegan played by Chance the Rapper, on paper this reads as hilarious.

Read more

Movies

Best Horror Movies to Watch on Shudder Right Now

By Rosie Fletcher and 1 other

TV

Buffy: The Animated Series – The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Spin-Off That Never Was

By Caroline Preece

Unfortunately, the actual film is paper thin. Loosely following a series of murders inflicted on a crappy pizza joint’s deliverymen, the film never unties its tangled and knotted threads about ghosts and humans living side by side, or witches manipulating local city politics in a bid for demonic gentrification. And more damning than its Gateway to Hell is that none of this is very funny. At only 83 minutes, Slice feels like an eternity of waiting for a pizza that never arrives. – DC

16. In Fabric (2018)

When it comes to horror movies, A24 has certainly done its best to (mostly) steer away from the traditional tropes of vampires, zombies, werewolves, and masked killers. As a result, the company has attracted talent like British filmmaker Peter Strickland, who followed up the atmospheric Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and the erotic The Duke of Burgundy (2014) with this bizarre tale of a haunted dress.

The clothing item in question is a red number that passes from one owner to another, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. Fortunately, Strickland plays a lot of this for laughs, smartly realizing that a sentient dress might test the patience of even the most diehard horror fan. The film is a slow burn, but Strickland finds just the right balance of weird humor and surreal horror to wring both laughs and genuinely eerie moments out of his odd premise. – Don Kaye

15. The Monster (2016)

Bryan Bertino’s The Monster is a strange one to include on this list, if only because at its heart this is an archetypal creature feature with little more to say than “boo.” Compared to other horror movies released by A24 this can seem slight, but when The Monster works, its boo is occasionally bloodcurdling.

Read more

Movies

Katharine Isabelle on How Ginger Snaps Explored the Horror of Womanhood

By Rosie Fletcher

TV

BBC/Netflix Dracula’s Behind-the-Scenes Set Secrets

By Louisa Mellor

Centered on a mother and daughter trapped at night on a country road with an obscured beastie in the woods trying to get into their broken down car, The Monster could’ve been produced as B-schlock in the ‘80s. Why it’s better is twofold: First the film leans into its atmospheric use of shadows and silhouettes by cinematographer Julie Kirkwood—who takes Steven Spielberg’s “less is more” approach in framing the monster—and second, there is the headlong dive into the unpleasant by Zoe Kazan. Playing a young mother who has little interest in her daughter or her well-being, Kazan’s Cathy reveals in one flashback at a time a cruel apathy far more beleaguering than the attacks of the titular monster in the present.

Alas the third act turns into pure pulp when the creature comes out of the shadows, and the cast and body count are needlessly increased. Still, the effect of some of the attack scenes, and Kazan’s nuanced exploration of a mother who fails to impress even herself, makes The Monster worthwhile. – DC

14. The Hole in the Ground (2019)

Being a single parent is hard. Being a single parent is harder when your child suddenly turns into a monster and you have to deal with the consequences. Such is the plot of The Hole in the Ground, A24’s solid but vaguely underwhelming chiller.

Lee Cronin’s debut may hit all the right parental panic beats, summon up a couple of worthy performances, and stick the mysterious, open-ended landing, but it still suffers compared to other A24 efforts because genre fans have seen it all before. As the film slaps a slick coat of paint over its influences, from Don’t Look Now to The Babadook and beyond, it elevates its fairly standard ‘changeling child’ theme, but in doing so it also gives us way too much room to breathe when we should be suffocating under the weight of tension between Seána Kerslake’s spiralling mother and her demonic son.

The result? A middling horror that you’re more likely to describe as “quite good” rather than “great.” – Kirsten Howard

13. Life After Beth (2014)

When a relationship is over, it’s over and it’s never the same if you go back: This is the central theme of Life After Beth, a zombie comedy about moving on. Dane DeHaan stars as Zach, a boy devastated after the death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza). But when she unexpectedly returns from the dead things just don’t quite click. Is it because the relationship has run its course? Or is it that she’s gradually turning into a flesh hungry undead monster? Either way things can’t carry on…

Read more

Movies

Zombie Comedies Ranked

By David Crow

TV

The Walking Dead vs. Real-Life Survivalists: How to Prep for The Zombie Apocalypse

By Ron Hogan

A light comedy with a strong supporting cast (Molly Shannon, John C Reilly, Anna Kendrick, Paul Reiser) Life After Beth made its debut at Sundance in 2014. Though zombie rom-coms are somewhat a dime a dozen these days, this one stands out for its performances and certain set pieces like zombie Beth hiking with an oven strapped to her back. – Rosie Fletcher

12. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015)

As what I would argue is the most underrated horror gem in A24’s catalog, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a wicked subversion of horror tropes that benefits from the less you know about its story. Suffice to say the film is a slow-burning march toward perdition told in triptych. With three protagonists, first-time writer-director Oz Perkins seamlessly drifts between the perspectives of Kat (Kiernan Shipka), Rose (Lucy Boynton), and Joan (Emma Roberts).

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Movies

Gretel & Hansel and Returning to Dark Fairy Tale Roots

By Don Kaye

Movies

Best Modern Horror Movies

By Don Kaye

It is easy to see how the first two intersect, with Kat and Rose being the only two girls at their Catholic boarding school whose parents haven’t come to pick them up for winter break. How their long weekend connects with Joan’s separate hitchhiking through a snowy stretch of America is not immediately clear, but the bubbling sense of despair in all three narratives is omnipresent, even before Rose gives it shape by mentioning the urban legend of nuns worshiping the Dark One in the boiler room below.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter trades in horror archetypes, but then digs deeper by revealing untapped, feminine complexities to previously well-worn narratives where young women are merely vessels or victims. Unspooling like a waking nightmare, Perkins’ dreamlike atmosphere is only for the patient, but the climax is so shocking and brazenly subversive that it demands to be reexamined as the full extent of its desolation becomes clear. – DC

11. Climax (2018)

One could argue that every one of the five feature films directed by Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noe, including such controversy-courting titles as I Stand Alone, Irreversible, and Enter the Void, has been a horror film in some way. Noe’s movies are often filled with nihilism, despair, and existential dread, with even the act of sex portrayed as an often violent invasion instead of an expression of love.

Having said that, Climax is clearly Noe’s most formal attempt at the genre yet, as a troupe of dancers isolated at an abandoned school begin to suffer from the effects of punch spiked with LSD during an after-rehearsal party. Predictably, the wheels quickly come off as the assembled dancers rape, beat, torture, and kill each other throughout the horrifying, increasingly frenzied night. – DK

10. Saint Maud (2020)

The directorial debut of Rose Glass sees a pious young nurse (Morfydd Clarke) who believes God talks to her directly, on a mission to save the soul of her dying patient (Jennifer Elhe). Saint Maud is a mix of psychological, religious, and body horror against the setting of a run down seaside town which plays like hallucinogenic social realism.

Clarke as Maud is terrific–slight of frame with a troubled mind, she is still a fierce warrior doing what she believes is God’s work from the humble hovel of her home. While Maud punishes her body in service of her spirit, her patient, Amanda, celebrates hers while it lets her down. As a former dancer, she will drink, smoke, and love in her final days.

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Movies

The Scariest Films Ever Made and How They Frighten Us

By Matt Glasby

Movies

Saint Maud Review: Elevated Horror That’s a Revelation

By Rosie Fletcher

Glass’ debut is beautiful and powerful with a score, visuals, and setting that all contribute to a sense of disquiet that grows to a euphoric/horrific conclusion. An unforgettable film that singles Glass out as absolutely one to watch. – RF

9. It Comes at Night (2017)

The exact nature, origin, and spread of the grisly infectious disease that shreds society to pieces in It Comes at Night is never deeply examined; the movie is not interested in exploring the end of the world on some epic scale. Instead the effect it has is on a very small, very frightened group of people–two families that include Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Riley Keough, and Carmen Ejogo among their dwindling ranks–who are trying their best to stay alive and sane.

In that sense, the title of the movie (and, to a degree, the way it was marketed) is somewhat misleading. What comes at night is not some rampaging horde of flesh-eating walking corpses but rather the cold, insidious effect of fear, grief, and distrust. These two invisible threats eat away at what’s left of our civilized selves.

Director Trey Edward Shults (Waves) spares nothing and no one in this grim fable; by the time it reaches its inconsolably bleak conclusion, the cumulative effect of this quiet, bare bones film is devastating. – DK

8. Enemy (2013)

Before he tackled science fiction epics like Blade Runner 2049 and the upcoming Dune, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve made smaller, independent dramas and psychological thrillers. One of those was Enemy, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal in a double role as two men who are exactly the same physically but quite different in temperament and personality.

Based loosely on the novel The Double by Jose Saramago (who wrote the horrifying novel Blindness), Enemy is less a horror film and more an exercise in neo-noirish surrealism. It’s anchored by Villeneuve’s chilly direction and two excellent performances from Gyllenhaal, who deftly explores the definition of manhood, the male-female dynamic (as he navigates the wife of one man and the girlfriend of the other), and the nature of identity.

Enemy doesn’t offer easy answers and its shocking ending is very much open to wide interpretation. It’s a challenging early work from a director who’s now moved on to become one of cinema’s most ambitious science fiction auteurs. – DK

7. Under the Skin (2013)

Jonathan Glazer’s loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel is a strange beast to be sure. Developed over more than a decade, using several first time performers with scenes shot with hidden cameras, it stars Scarlett Johansson as a predatory alien scouring the Scottish countryside, picking up men that she then lures into a strange black liquid which consumes them.

It’s a convincing look at humanity through the eyes of an extraterrestrial, in all its oddness–from the kindness of girls in nightclubs, the utterly futile act of a man trying to save his drowning wife, and in doing so ending both their lives, to the idiosyncrasies of beans on toast and Tommy Cooper. Johansson is a revelation, going unrecognized in her interactions with real people, bringing an authenticity and later an aching sympathy to her performance.

If the ending is bleak, and there are moments of true horror, there’s levity here too, as well as something quite profound to be said about human nature. – RF

6. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos–already a purveyor of the weird, surreal and darkly satiric before this or The Favourite, as seen with 2016’s The Lobster–went into full horror mode for this relentlessly unsettling tale of supernatural revenge in which a surgeon (Colin Farrell), his wife (Nicole Kidman), and their kids are made to pay for the death of a man who Farrell lost during surgery.

The impetus of all this is the man’s son, Martin, played by Barry Keoghan in one of the most disturbing performances of recent years. Farrell and Kidman are equally unnerving as their purposely stilted work in the early part of the film gives way to show the cracks in their seemingly perfect family façade.

Read more

Games

How Scorn Turned the Art of H.R. Giger into a Nightmarish Horror Game World

By John Saavedra

Movies

The WNUF Halloween Special: The Making of the Most Fun Found Footage Horror Movie Ever

By Gavin Jasper

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is horror at its purest: an unexplainable examination of what happens when the irrational intrudes on the rational. It leaves you rattled without a single jump scare or visual effect. – DK

5. Green Room (2015)

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier followed up his excellent breakout feature, 2013’s Blue Ruin, with this taut, suspenseful and dread-inducing thriller set in the grimy, sweaty environs of an out-of-the-way punk rock club. There, a hardcore group on a micro-budget tour of the Pacific Northwest manage to grab a make-up gig after their original show is canceled, but find to their horror that the bar is a white supremacist hangout… and they’ve just witnessed a murder to boot.

It’s not surprising that Saulnier rings maximum tension out of the situation since Blue Ruin was such an accomplished piece of work. What is surprising is seeing Captain Picard himself, Patrick Stewart, playing the local neo-Nazi leader with such believable, low-key malevolence. The rest of the cast, including the sadly missed Anton Yelchin and the always reliable Imogen Poots, is equally effective in making this an exceptionally smart, intense roller coaster ride. – DK

4. Midsommar (2019)

Emerging director Ari Aster made two very different horror movies for A24 virtually back-to-back with Hereditary and Midsommar, and was vocal about the mental and emotional breakdown that ensued thanks to this near-impossible endeavor. Accordingly, Midsommar evolved into what could be considered a “difficult second album,” one which managed to exorcise some of his personal demons for both the entertainment and discomfort of an intrigued audience.

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Movies

Midsommar: Florence Pugh Considers Ending Theories, May Queen Fandom

By David Crow

This ambitious, unsettling masterpiece about one young woman’s struggle to process trauma while she is simultaneously expected to perform the emotional labor of holding together a substandard relationship became a visual flipside to Hereditary’s darkness, creating a bright, horrifying world full of flowers, lush green pastures, and organic pagan rituals that all combine delicately to present us with a piping hot mug of “good for her” energy.

Though the argument over whether Hereditary or Midsommar is the superior film will probably never end, this often-hallucinogenic folk tale isn’t just one of A24’s best horror projects, but one of the greatest horror movies of all time, period. – KH

3. The Lighthouse (2019)

“How long have we been on this rock?” It’s a simple question posed by one lighthouse keeper (or “wicke”) to another in Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse. But as anyone who’s viewed the movie can attest, its answer is nigh unknowable. Eggers’ follow-up to The Witch is as phallic as that first movie was feminine, as evidenced by the titular structure that old seaman Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) constantly demands his new second Ephraim (Robert Pattinson) keep scrubbed clean.

Filmed in black and white, and in a 1.19:1 aspect ratio—similar to what Fritz Lang used to shoot Expressionist serial killer movie M (1931)—The Lighthouse is steeped in the old ways of doing things, both as a piece of cinema and as a sea shanty of a tale. As writers, Robert and his brother Max Eggers revel in the nautical jargon of their characters, particularly Dafoe’s Wake, who is like a corncob pipe given legs. Yet Dafoe and Pattinson never descend into caricature; they instead feast on their Sisyphean characters.

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Movies

The Lighthouse: the myths and archetypes behind the movie explained

By Rosie Fletcher

Movies

The Lighthouse: Willem Dafoe Reveals the Secret of a Two-Hander Film

By David Crow

More esoteric and ambiguous than The Witch, some might defy categorizing The Lighthouse as a full-throated horror. But the picture’s haunting ghost story setup and heightened use of both claustrophobic interiors and barren exteriors beg to differ, as do the film’s final Lovecraftian overtures toward madness. A masterful exercise in the macabre and hellish, The Lighthouse confirms Eggers as one of the most interesting voices to emerge from his generation. – DC

2. The Witch (2015)

To fully appreciate The Witch, it must be made clear that there’s a literal witch in the woods. Writer-director Robert Eggers emphasizes this early on, allowing the audience to glimpse her scraggly and unholy shape as the crone sacrifices a newborn to Satan. This not only signals the movie is playing for keeps, it also removes any sort of psychological ambiguity about what’s going on.

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Movies

The Witch Has One of Horror’s Greatest Endings

By David Crow

Intensely committed to immersing audiences in the daily lives and nocturnal dreads of 17th century Puritans, The Witch is steeped in a deep-seated anxiety for supernatural entities that could poison your crops, or live in every bump heard in the black of night. With a meticulous eye for historical detail, Eggers creates the best cinematic approximation of Calvinists ever put to screen, and in so doing, allows viewers to both live with superstitions of the Dark One taking the shape of animals, and to judge those obsessed with him.

For The Witch is also an unnerving character study about a family disintegrating before our eyes, and allowing their biases and patriarchal repressions to lead them toward the damnation. With a captivating ensemble of actors, including a star-making turn by Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, the Puritan who is desperate to remain pure, the film basks in its dexterity with early modern English. All of which heightens the tension until a transcendent third act, which can rightly be read as an embrace of despair or liberated ecstasy, depending on who you ask. More than just a great horror movie, The Witch is flatly one of the best American movies produced in this century. – DC

1. Hereditary (2018)

Ari Aster’s directorial debut has become something of a benchmark for horror of a particular kind, whether you want to label it “elevated,” “artsy,” or anything else. Whatever you want to call it, Hereditary is an exceptional debut and a crushingly oppressive work about a cursed family laden with grief. 

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Movies

Hereditary Ending Explained

By David Crow

Movies

Hereditary: The Real Story of King Paimon

By Tony Sokol

A shock scare about 20 minutes in will leave you reeling and everything just gets worse from there, leading to a finale that is so insane and horrific that it almost comes as a relief after the excruciating misery and unease of the rest of the movie.

Toni Collette won multiple awards (though notably she wasn’t Oscar nominated) for her extraordinary performance as Annie, the doomed daughter of the dead matriach whose demise sets in a motion a series of events that are disastrous for her disaffected son (Alex Wolff), stoic husband (Gabriel Byrne), and strange daughter (Milly Shapiro). A story about family, tragedy, and inexorable catastrophe Hereditary is one of the best horror movies of the century so far. – RF

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The post A24 Horror Movies Ranked From Worst to Best appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[girlonfilmmovies]

The Top 25 Films of 2019

25: Shadow (dir. Zhang Yimou)

"Without the real, there can be no shadow. A principle no one's understood."

After a string of terrible films trying to play to Hollywood audiences, Zhang Yimou manages to successfully return to the goldmine he stuck in the early 2000s and craft another absolutely gorgeous wuxia. Here he swaps out the poetic, colorful beauty in favor of monochromatic, surprisingly violent tone poem about deceit. It ultimately works against it, as by the seventh or eighth double cross you kind of just give up trying to figure out who's on what side, but the main action setpiece is so wonderful it deserves a spot for that alone. Hopefully a good sign for Yimou's future, as long as we don't have another nationalist war epic that somehow inexplicably also has a white savior narrative too.

24: Climax (dir. Gaspar Noé)

"...something's kicking in..."

Noe takes us for another plunge into the dark, twisted, vomit-inducing, neon-lit hellscape that is his mind and at least has the common courtesy to put the pleasant parts upfront this time. While it will eventually devolve into the same type of chaos that we all love/hate from him, the first act is kind of a wonderful departure from him. He basically accidently makes a musical for a while, with wonderful and deeply intricate dance choreography as well as a fantastic extended sequence where every character jumps in and out of frame and gets a chance to strut their stuff. That movie would have been a strong top five contender, but alas, the man has his particular quirks that he must abide by. But at least he also strung together probably the best soundtrack and sound design of the year, with the fantastic EDM bangers rumbling through the walls throughout the entirety of the film.

23: Long Shot (dir. Jonathon Levine)

"Oohhh boooy!"

Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen doing a political comedy that manages to be both smart and extremely funny seems like a long shot indeed, but Johnathon Levine finally strikes gold again after a number of disappointing duds. He manages to make a pretty good story about how navigating the political minefield destroys what little hope and dreams high level politicians still manage to have, but then he also happens to make it all absolutely hilarious too. Theron demonstrates a surprisingly strong comic game too, easily matching all the other talent and cracking jokes along with them. It ends up being a charming romance where the woman takes charge in a very pleasant change of pace. And if nothing else, the way Seth Rogen yells "oh boy" in that video is always going to make me laugh no matter what.

22: 6 Underground (dir. Michael Bay)

"Ghosts have one power above all others: to haunt the living. Haunt them... for what they've done."

Theoretical question: what say Netflix gave Michael Bay a blank check and no restrictions, and he turned in the most overblown, dialed to eleven, nonsensical spectacle that he ever crafted and was allowed to put it into almost every American home for free? Now what if I told you that it was actually kind of awesome? Sure, it's basically a child playing with his $150 million dollar GI Joe set, smashing his toys together and making pew-pew sounds, but it's also probably the best testament to the power of conventional effects work over the increasing insistence on CGI for big setpieces. Let's face it: explosions are pretty cool, every one likes exotic locales and bright sports cars, and there's at least someone here to appeal to you (least surprisingly for me, it was Melanie Laurent with bangs wearing a suit). It almost reaches a late Michael Mann kind of abstraction, as both are respectively breaking apart the action movie into stranger combinations. Bay gives plot only because he contractually has to, and even then doesn't seem as committed to characterization as he is showcasing surprisingly brutal ways for the gang to dispatch their enemies. It's nonsense, but the damn best nonsense of the year.

21: Ip Man 4: The Finale (dir. Wilson Yip)

"Is that it?! Is this your Chinese Kung Fu?!"

The finale in the decade-long quadrilogy of supremely silly and borderline racist worship of China finally attempts to tackle America to delightfully amusing results. Scott Adkins doing his best evil R. Lee Ermey impression while slipping in modern neo-con punchlines, neverending Bruce Lee worship, and more nationalism and bad fake American accents than you could ever believe. Yet also a more bizarrely honest portrayal of racism in 1960s America than most movies would ever have the courage to acknowledge. It’s almost fascinating considering how a lot of the non-Asian racism basically serves as set dressing, but they still put more effort there than pretty much every Hollywood movie set in the 60s that isn’t directly about civil rights. But ultimately they're selling you a bill of goods saying "watch Ip Man beat the crap out of racist meatheads" and you better believe they're going to give you what you want.

20: Let It Snow (dir. Luke Snellin)

"Have you ever been with someone, and you stay up until like 4AM just talking about everything, and you're just like, I can't believe I get to exist at the same time as you?"

Okay, so let me explain myself on this one:

So yeah, it certainly is a generic teen romcom where everyone plays into basic teenage stereotypes, half the cast is clearly nowhere near eighteen, and all of the romance is oddly chaste. But there truly is something to be said about representation in a romcom, and after a thousand boring cis, straight, hetero couples falling in love for decades, this movie actually managed to hit a lot of notes that are at best rarely explored in the genre and also manages to probably sneak in some genuine firsts. While both the "tomboy/softboy" and "Latina struggling with her family" storylines have been done before, these are some nice, cute little iterations on those befitting a teen-friendly movie. But the Dorrie/Kerry story is not only legitimately groundbreaking, but also an absolutely perfect encapsulation of the types of problems that queer teenagers struggle with during that time of their lives. It's a queer romance, played by two actually not-straight people, with one of them being a nonbinary actor too. And it's not cordoned off into some bargain bin DIY indie that fell out the back of the truck on the way to an indie film festival; no, this is in a major holiday release, with well-known actors, and as one of the central storylines! Plus, it perfectly captures the woes of modern teen coming out, knowing that everything will probably still be cool, but the fear haunting you as all you can do is look jealously at someone who is out and proud. And it does it without being real shitty and horribly traumatic too. Eat your fucking heart out, Love, Simon!

19. John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum (dir. Chad Stahelski)

"Si vis pacem, para bellum!"

Another year, another John Wick movie. There's more plot; you don't care, and let's be honest, neither do I. Stahelski is here to serve up more badass characters and incredible action, and no one in Hollywood does it quite like him. It's got familiar action favorites demonstrating why they still remain supreme, with Yayan Ruhian, Cecep Arif Rahman, Tiger Chen, and the ever underrated Mark Dascascos. It's got surprising action showcases for Halle Berry, Lance Reddick, and somehow Boban Marjanović. It's got great character actors doing their thing, from the returning McShane and Fishburne to newcomers Saïd Taghmaoui and Anjelica Huston. It's got Asia Kate Dillon as an awesome nonbinary shadow organization asshole. It has a bewildering Jason Mantzoukas cameo. And above all else, it has Keanu Reeves, still demonstrating not only his incredible physical skill, but also how to perfectly utilize his particular acting style to create an iconic character.

18. Doctor Sleep (dir. Mike Flanagan)

"Man takes a drink. A drink takes the drink. And then the drink takes a man."

While not the most accurate adaption, it might be the only Stephen King adaptation that comes to mind that actually successfully channels what makes him such an appealing author. King's stories have an inherent corniness to them and for as much as you unsuccessfully try to cover that up (look to this year's The Outsider for a good example), it's where the true charm of his work shines. It's what makes this so fun, because as much as an epic, eldritch terror is exciting, it still doesn't have the goofy fun of a bunch of vampiric bohemian drifters led by a Stevie Knicks knockoff in a top hat breathing up souls. Plus, the epic three hour runtime actually allows Flanagan to at least try to cover all the more subtle serious characterizations of Danny Torrance, from his recurring alcoholism to him seeking closure with regards to his parents. It manages to actually make the final act's nostalgia play kind of work, or at the very least get the terrible memory of the Ready Player One version out of my head.

17. Her Smell (dir. Alex Ross Perry)

"I thought you were better than this, but deep down I knew you weren't."

Perry must have had some extra pent-up nastiness in him after having to restrain himself while writing Christopher Robin (by the way, that happened), because he really created one of the nastiest characters in cinema here. Her Smell is the equivalent of being locked in a room with the shittiest person you'll ever meet, as she constant lashes out at everyone and everything with the kind of delirium that the truly demented are cursed with. And credit to Elizabeth Moss where it's due: she really perfectly embodies such a horrible human being and proceeds beat you damn near to death with it during a majority of the runtime. Eventually it slows down and all of the problems become apparent once they script isn't flying by at a thousand words a minute. But Moss literally did her job so well that people fucking hate this movie because of her character, and if that isn't a testament to her acting talent than I don't know what is.

16. High Life (dir. Claire Denis)

"At 99% the speed of light, the entire sky converged before our eyes. This sensation, moving backwards even though we're moving forwards, getting further from what's getting nearer. Sometimes I just can't stand it."

Denis finally makes her English debut with what she does best: nauseatingly uncomfortable sexuality oozing from terrible people doing horrible things. In this case, she takes an innovative detour into sci-fi, setting up a decades-long story of human experimentation, murder, the horrors of space travel, and whatever unholy things are going on inside of the "Fuck Box". It has an appropriately dingy production design too; the clean retro-futurist spaceship design soon dissolves into a torn apart den of depravity, caked in a mixture of filth and dry blood. Pattinson once again manages to be likeable while also being extremely standoff-ish; only playing with his baby daughter do we seem to see him actually enjoy interacting with a human being. Kind of gets lost in the sauce near the end, but at least manages to land some surprising emotional notes considering the kind of horrors that they've shown up until then.

15. The Farewell (dir. Lulu Wang)

"Chinese people have saying: when people get cancer they die. It's not cancer that kills them, it's the fear."

Lulu Wang's followup to Posthumous is such a massive step up in talent it's not even funny. She manages to make such a wonderfully soulful and loving movie about impending death by utilizing near perfect comic timing to defuse a situation that threatens to stray too dark. Not to mention her point of view on modern China from a non state-sponsored eye actually captures a much more accurate shot of the country itself. It's almost as if an Edward Yang movie had set itself more modest expectations -- it's pleasant, goes down well, teaches you a couple of things about Chinese culture, and manages to do it all in only a hundred minutes. And Awkwafina manages to hold her own against far more experienced actors, even if you can tell her Mandarin is still a little spotty.

14. Uncut Gems (dir. Josh and Benny Safdie)

"I think you are the most annoying person I have ever met. I hate being with you, I hate looking at you... And if I had my way I would never see you again."

Adam Sandler's magnum opus performance -- there will never be another character that fully embraces every grating aspect of his style of acting and manages to weaponize them for two anxiety-inducing hours of hell. Sandler's Howard Ratner is an absolute sewer rat scumbag, an untrustworthy coward, and a perennial fuck-up of epic proportions. But he's still so charismatic and powerful on screen that you root for him every time he drives you further up the wall. And the Safdie brothers know how to keep him moving too, never letting the audience catch a breath of air for this movie-length panic attack as the odds stack further against Howard each minute. Whenever you see Sandler phoning in his comedies for fat checks, just remember this performance and how pretty much every awards committee completely ignored this film. No wonder he doesn't bother trying anymore.

13. The Last Black Man In San Francisco (dir. Joe Talbot)

"You don't get to hate it unless you love it."

A wonderfully evocative love letter to a changing city that is so full of life in every way, from the vibrant movement of the camerawork to the bombastic and powerful soundtrack blasting throughout. But it actually plays more like a New Orleans' funeral march, a melancholic chronicle of the original denizens of San Francisco even as the city warps into the caricature that it's slowly becoming. There is a definite feeling that the aggressive gentrification is unavoidable and even the love of the original quirky denizens can only stave off the metaphorical steamroller that paves over the past. It makes for a wonderful counterpoint to the previous year's Blindspotting: both about young black men dealing with gentrification in the Bay Area, but Blindspotting starts as a very angry comic satire that eventually ends on a note of hope and a will to survive the changing tide, whereas this begins as a joyous celebration of the city and ends on a heartbreaking resignation in the face of everything. Both come from respectively very different sides of San Fran culture, but it's rather interesting seeing each have such different approaches to the same topic.

12. The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (dir. Henry Dunham)

"How do we know it's not you?"

A simple "pressure cooker" scenario done to perfection: one empty warehouse, a bunch of hardened standoff-ish militia men, a missing gun, a ticking clock, and a whole lot of suspicious side eyes and probing questions. It helps that the gruff suspects are a perfect who's who of roughened character actors, all previously well-versed in playing suspicious people, and all of them hiding the kind of unspoken rage that makes a man secretly join an armed militia. All of this told with a nerve-wracking minimalism and style as weirdly detached from reality as some of these men are. One hell of a debut for Henry Dunham and hopefully a sign of good things to come.

11. Booksmart (dir. Olivia Wilde)

"How about we play a *rousing* round of J'ACCUSE!"

Profoundly silly and yet also so disarmingly sweet, Olivia Wilde whips a wildly stylized portrait of Gen Z high-schoolers and the many ways that they vastly differ from their older peers. Certainly much more welcoming and accepting of the diversity of teenagers than pretty much any other teen movies from the past, although they still poke fun at some particular brands of modern "wokeness" too. Stuffed to the brim with wonderfully weird characters, between the lovable catty theatre duo of George and Alan, the cringe-inducing desperate rich kid Jared, the endearingly dumb thirstball Theo, the dorky and blissfully unaware queer-bait Ryan, the effortlessly cool and extremely "top energy" Hope, and the absolutely batshit wildness that is Gigi. But mainly it serves as a vehicle for Devers and Feldstein, with both bouncing perfectly back and forth off each other in moments of comedy and drama. Feldstein always pulls off huge laughs pretty much every line and Devers sells a perfect amount of baby-gay awkwardness in one of the sweetest (and heartbreaking) queer romance stories in film. But above all else, it's just so damn fun and aware of what teenagers are actually like than most movies ever have been.

10. Luce (dir. Julius Onah)

*chuckles* "You really think I believe that stuff?"

One of the most wildly uncomfortable experiences in recent cinema history, but not due to any horrifyingly explicit graphic content being shoved in our faces. No, Onah and Lee created something much more discomforting: a constant challenging of all our biases and stereotypes, of us wanting to give chances and have faith in those that we trust. Kelvin Harrison Jr. delivers one of the best acting performances in recent memory because he's able to literally do everything; his Luce somehow manages to perfectly walk the tightrope required for a performance like his. With him behind it, Luce is such a charming, loving, likeable character but there's always just something that seems off about him. And even if Spencer's Wilson has a fixation on him that crosses all sorts of legal and moral boundaries, wouldn't we be cheering her on under different circumstances? In a way, she herself is trying to communicate a lesson about perception too, one that also mires in deep, troubling waters. Even if the film still feels very stage-y due to it's source material, the cold clinical aesthetic only further helps it make us squirm in our seats.

9. Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll (dir. Haruka Fujita)

"Nobody wants a letter that cannot be delivered."

An absolutely magical experience that artistically excels over the original TV series it's based off of. The production is still as impressive as any other KyoAni work, but the composition and lighting in particular are outstanding, selling the social isolation of the first half and the childlike wonder of the second half. Beginning with a sublime Victorian romance in the first half, the story eventually morphs into a tribute to the workers of the world, the cogs in the machine. But in the context of the studio's recent history and the horrific arson attack that claimed 36 members of the studio, this instead comes off as a battlecry against the opposition against them. It's a story valuing those who are overlooked in the process of creation, a story about strong determined women, a story of a young girl defining her own future against society. KyoAni as a studio were most known for treating all their employees exceptionally as well as being a primarily female-led studio, both unfortunate exceptions in the industry as well as the target for a lot of unfair online hatred against them (and surely played some sort of role in why the arson attack happened to them specifically). To see the studio make their first post-attack work so proudly emblematic of what made them unique makes this so much more powerful than you would expect.

8. The Nightengale (dir. Jennifer Kent)

"You know what it's like to have a white fella take everything that you have, don't ya?"

The classic revenge fantasy narrative warped into a bleak, cynical portrait of racist cruelty in 1800s Tasmania. Jennifer Kent, improving leaps and bounds from the relatively straightforward Babadook, crafts a searing indictment of the foundations of colonialism and the misogynistic undercurrent of the barbarous society. It's a revenge movie where the vengeance is horrible and unsatisfying -- there's no crowd pleasing murderous money-shots, just brief moments of comeuppance in the face of everything in the world working against our two protagonists. Those who are squeamish should be aware that it is exceptionally graphic and grueling at times, although Kent does manage to keep up a very good pace for the two and a half hours of hell.

7. Transit (dir. Christian Petzold)

"They say that those who were left never forget. But it's not true. They have the sweet, sad songs. Pity is with them. Those who leave, no one is with them. They have no songs."

Hitchcock by way of Kafka -- a classic existential mystery told in a disorienting separate reality not quite like our own. It's a bold move to take a Holocaust set narrative and completely throw out the actual setting itself, but Petzold only enhances the weird themes of the story by taking it to a completely different but still very familiar time. This is a classic tale of becoming the person you say you are but really aren't -- then begging the question of what if you're not the only one also living a false identity. Buoyed by an excellent and very enigmatic lead performance from Franz Rogowski, who displays a tremendous skill for playing somebody so closed off but also very charismatic and watchable.

6. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (dir. Quentin Tarantino)

"When you come to the end of the line, with a buddy who is more than a brother and a little less than a wife, getting blind drunk together is really the only way to say farewell."

Tarantino trades in his B-movie worship and penchant for comical bloodbaths (well, for the most part) to make something I certainly didn't expect from him: a relaxed hangout movie about getting old and falling out of fashion. Exceptional production design whisks us away to the height of Hollywood and three different people all looking at their future careers in very different lights. Leo gets to stretch his wings in all sorts of silly fun ways and Brad Pitt finally lets go of the young superstar image and easily slips into his more natural "hot single dad" swagger, playing the most effortlessly cool character of his career. Tarantino sets aside time to look back on his own flaws as well and playfully reflects on his own particular ...quirks. Easily his best since his 90s prime and the first time in a long time I've felt the maturity that he showcased in Jackie Brown.

5. The Lighthouse (dir. Robert Eggers)

"Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK!"

Hyper-masculine mania as told through a wonderful blend of dark comedy and cosmic horror and with some of the most lush black-and-white cinematography maybe ever in a film. Eggers' now trademark devotion to absolute accurate period detail in both visual design and dialogue greatly helps this reach transcendent heights. But it's truly the two performances of Dafoe and Pattinson that help it weave a perfect spiral of insanity that also manages to be so oddly fun. Never could there be any other paring of actors that would perfectly showcase these two dirty sea-dogs going stark raving mad at each other so well.

4. Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster)

"As Hårga takes, so Hårga also gives."

(Director's Cut) Every generation deserves their own paranoia-fueled pagan horrorshow, but Aster strikes a much deeper vein in his epic take on the classic territory The Wicker Man had previously claimed. The brutal rituals of the Hårga are only set dressing most of the time, with much more focus poured into the vile toxicity plaguing the relationship between students Dani and Christian. Reynor's Christian is such a perfect portrayal of a terrible influence -- he's charming, fun, and likeable when he's on your side, but the second anybody goes against him his seedy manipulation begins to seep into everything he says. Pugh continues her winning streak too, delivering a broken person desperately trying to put a smile on while falling apart on the inside as she realizes she truly is all alone in the world. While some might be disappointed by the lack of actual "terror" for a good chunk of the movie, Aster has found something much more likely to scar us than these friendly Swedish cultists.

3. Sunset (dir. László Nemes)

"The horror of the world hides behind these infinitely pretty things."

After striking gold with Son of Saul, Laszlo Nemes takes a hard turn into a very different genre but manages to create a wonderfully unique spin on classic detective noir. His signature camerawork powers this yarn, successfully taking the claustrophobic eye of Saul and using it to give a truly immersive sense of place in the tumultuous world of 1913 Budapest, where danger is simmering under the surface and ready to boil over at any moment. After all, noir is always about the eye of the detective, so Nemes' style takes it to a literal degree where everything outside of Irisz' field of vision is incomprehensible. We catch the same shady sideways glances and hushed whispers at the same time she does too. The plotting, like all noir tales, gets a little too complex for its own good, although it's less because of double-crossing and deceit and more from the story slowly dropping its connection to reality to function on a far more allegorical level. But as far as immersive, experiential cinema goes, not even 1917 can stack up to this film's highs, as the enraged lower-class populace eventually comes for the heads of the bourgeoise and Irisz suddenly realizes she is in the very wrong place at the very wrong time.

2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma)

"Do all lovers feel they're inventing something?"

An absolutely breathtaking portrait (hehe) of yearning and love, so astonishingly romantic and actually aware of what will make a woman swoon. Every technical aspect is perfect, from the gorgeous locale to the lovely windswept dresses to the soft, classical cinematography. But the true magic comes from Merlant and Haenel perfectly delivering every line of Sciamma's wonderous script. Those two have a sexual tension strong enough to burn down the theater, as their shy glances turn into deep longing stares and both their steely professional reserves give way to poorly suppressed joy at just being able to be with the other. Even their initial terse dialogue melts into pure romantic splendor, as they lovingly catalog all the little gestures the other does when flustered. Their connection during filming was powerful enough to fuel rumors around the two in the press and is currently providing the desire for every thirsty lesbian who finishes this to immediately pull up videos from the press tour and hunt for those same things between the actors themselves. And trust me, they are there.

1. Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho)

"Not 'rich but still nice.' Nice because she's rich, you know? Hell, if I had all this money, I'd be nice too!"

Very rarely does a film come along that actually warrants to be described as "perfect", as in one that literally generates no critiques in any way even if I was forced to pick something at gunpoint to complain about. But Parasite truly does every single thing right. Even Bong's tonal whiplash style, which does grate on me at times, somehow fits perfectly here as the schemes become increasingly madcap and the increasing sense that this will all come crashing down horribly mounts ever higher. Until then, it's an absolute joy to watch in every way, as Bong stacks the card deck higher and all the characters dive further into the sewer for their own benefit. The midpoint pivot works wonderfully too, as it goes to show that literally every person is getting played in the world of Parasite. It's massive success is only surprising to those who haven't seen it: it's the perfect movie for the era it came out in and may as well be the watershed moment for a new age of cinema where Hollywood finally admits that it's not the king of the world anymore.

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior Home and Drive-In Edition June 26, 2020 – MY SPY, IRRESISTIBLE, THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS and more!

June comes to an end as we passed through the summer solstice over the weekend. The 4th of July is next week, and the opening of movie theaters in New York and L.A. is edging closer, yet it still feels like the summer of 2020 will be forever known as the summer that never happened. I’m not even sure if I’ll be trying to predict the box office until things settle down, and we get into some semblance of normalcy, and that may never happen if scientists are to be believed that COVID will return in the fall.

The big release for the week isn’t actually coming to theaters but to Amazon, and it might be the biggest movie to air on the streamer to date. As you may have guessed from the title, I’m talking about the STXfilms action-comedy MY SPY, starring David Bautista, which was one of the first movies to be delayed when COVID hit back in March, but that was after it was already delayed a number of times before that. The simple high-concept premise has Bautista playing super-spy JJ, who is demoted to keep an eye on the wife of a suspected gunsmuggler with his tech assistant (Kristen Schaal). No sooner do they start this surveillance mission, the woman’s 9-year-old daughter Sophie (Chloe Coleman) catches them and she blackmails JJ to teach her how to be a spy.

Yup, this new comedy from Peter Segal (Get Smart, Second Act) is as high concept as you can possibly get, and yet, and quite surprisingly, My Spy is rated PG-13, as opposed to be a straight-up kiddie friendly PG, but you can read more about that in my review.

Mini-Review: It seems like every potential muscle-bound action star has to have one of these movies in their filmography where they’re teamed with a young child co-star that inevitably steals all their scenes – I won’t bother to list them all. Former WWE star and Marvel regular, Dave Bautista, has a precocious co-star in Chloe Coleman, who is so delightful as Sophie you can easily forget that this is straight-up formula comedy  

I’ll be honest about the fact that totally unironically, I’ve been looking forward to seeing My Spy since I first saw a preview at Cinema-Con back in 2019. It was a bummer to miss the press screening in March, because it meant having to wait three extra months to finally watch it on my computer. Surprise, surprise, the movie more than met up to my expectations, as I found it funny, cute and from time to time, it even throws in a few unexpected surprises.

I’m definitely in the camp that Bautista hasn’t done anything particularly great as an actor outside playing Drax in the MCU, and JJ isn’t that much smarter or less muscle-bound. The set-up for his character to connect with Coleman’s Sophie is pretty obvious, but there’s no denying that Bautista and Coleman are so adorable and hilarious as an on-screen duo that it more than makes up for any of the misgivings one might have about what is meant as an accessible movie with mainstream appeal.  (In other words, this was never meant as an artfilm, so if you’re one of those snobby critics who gushed all over last year’s Uncut Gems, and you refuse to accept that there’s an audience for My Spy, then you’re a fucking hypocrite, plain and simple.)

Speaking of the F-word, I have to mention My Spy’s rating, which is not the PG one might normally expect, though it’s not due to violence or bad language or anything that awful that you couldn’t watch and enjoy this with your 8 to 10 year old. I felt I should get that out there in case any parents have misgivings.

Besides the main duo, there’s some nice added comedy from Kristen Schaal, as well as the seemingly obligatory gay neighbors, played by Devere Rogers and Noah Dalton Danby, who somehow manage to avoid stereotypes while providing a recurring bit of humor.

The movie starts getting a little predictable when Sophie pushes JJ to start dating her now-single mom, and things start losing a little steam as the movie gets away from the JJ/Sophie bonding and back to the actual plot, and that’s where the movie’s biggest problems lie. When the “villain” of the piece shows up, things get back into the usual formula that most will be expecting anyway. I will add that director Peter Segal seems to be particularly well suited at directing this, particularly when it gets into some of the action in the last act.

Sure, some of My Spy’s funniest jokes have shown up in various trailers, but turns out that it’s a fairly warm and funny movie that does its job in providing solid family entertainment.

Rating: 7/10

Jon Stewart returns to political comedy with his new movie, IRRESISTIBLE, (Focus Features), starring his former “Daily Show” correspondent Steve Carell as Gary Zimmer, the Democratic strategist who failed so horribly running the 2016 Presidential election. Undaunted, Zimmer hopes to revive the party by rallying behind a likeable everyman, Col. Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), as he runs for mayor of the small town of Deerlaken, Wisconsin. It would seem like an odd decision but clearly, the Republicans know that Zimmer has something bigger planned so they send their own strategist, Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne), to get behind the incumbent Republican mayor.

It’s pretty obvious this movie is probably more in Stewart’s wheelhouse than his previous film, Rosewater, but it also has more mainstream appeal and could help Stewart continue to get directing work in the future. Sure, there have been many similar political comedies like this that have tried to find the audience -- Bob Roberts, Primary Colours, Wag the Dog,Swing Vote -- but I’m not sure any of those came out when the country has been as divided as it is now.

It’s pretty nice seeing Stewart reuniting with Carell, who does a decent job in this fish-out-of-water comedy that mostly relies on how a DC bigwig might acclimate to a sociable smalltown – think Groundhog Day to the Nth level – which makes this comedy fall more into the vein of  Matt Damon and John Krasinski’s Promised Land, which I thought was a very underrated political film.

I’m a big Rose Byrne stan, and once again, we can see how delightfully funny she can be when playing such an awful person like Faith Brewster, but there’s quite a bit of fun awkward sexual tension between her and Carell. Another part of the equation is Hastings grown daughter, played by Mackenzie Davis, and most people watching this will probably hope this doesn’t go too far into that romantic realm, and thankfully, it doesn’t.

Irresistible may be a little predictable at times, but there’s a nice turn towards the end that makes up for some of the more obvious aspects of the storytelling, and Stewart certainly seems to be enough in his element to make this not too horrible an experience.

This week’s “Featured Film” is Peter Medak’s documentary, THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS (1091), about how Hungarian filmmaker ran into problems with Sellers while trying to make the 1973 pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun, an experience that almost ruined the filmmaker’s career. It’s kind of interesting for a filmmaker to take an in-depth look back at his own failures, but Medak’s story is particularly touching, only because it didn’t seem like he stood a chance when Sellers refused to show up on set and then brought in his equally eclectic best friend Spike Milligan to work on the script and create even more chaos.

Honestly, I have never seen Ghost in the Noonday Sun, but I enjoy a lot of Medak’s films that followed, including The Changeling and the excellent Romeo is Bleeding, so I went into this doc knowing that this incident didn’t completely kill Medak’s career, but obviously, it had a huge effect. It ends up being a fairly emotional film as Medak interviews some of the producers on the film as well as Milligan’s widows and others who were around during that period. He also learns new things about how he was dismissed from the project and used as a scapegoat for all the problems faced by the production, which began when the boat built for the movie crashed upon arriving in Cypress.  I generally like movies about the making of movies even when I haven’t seen the original movie, and Medak finds a way to offer some true sentiment and emotional insight into his tenuous relationship with Sellers.

Out now on VOD is Laura Holliday’s DADDY ISSUES (Gravitas Ventures), starring Kimberley Datnow as a Henrietta, a 20-something stand-up who has moved from London back to L.A. to take over the family business after her father dies and leaves her the company. She takes on this challenge in hopes of earning her now dead father’s approval.

I knew from almost the minute this started that I was going to hate this twee high concept indie that seems like so many other indie movies where the person putting it together had so many ideas but not enough actual story glue to hold all those ideas together. It’s fairly obvious from the slice of “Henry’s” stand-up set that begins this movie that she isn’t particularly funny. On top of that, she seems like another one of those spoiled and entitled Millennials who just isn’t happy unless she’s getting her own way. When the story quickly shifts  to L.A., and she’s surrounded by even more annoying Millennials, it gets even worse, especially because it feels the need to follow her best friend and housemate on their own journeys as well.

I have to say, as someone who didn’t automatically hate the recent Valley Girl remake, that Daddy Issues is infinitely worse, not only because it doesn’t have the fun musical numbers but just because it seems like such a precious endeavor that doesn’t seem like it will really be able to connect with anyone other than the filmmakers.  I found Datnow’s Henrietta to be so pathetic and again, not very funny, so getting through this movie was grueling, to say the least. At one point, Henri falls for an asshole named Hunter whom she had one date with. When that doesn’t work, she tries to reconnect with a couple other idiotic guys, but then she goes back with Hunter, and the whole time I was watching this movie thinking, “What’s the point? Are there really people this stupid and annoying on the planet?” (That’s rhetorical.)

Jon Swab’s RUN WITH THE HUNTED (Vertical) stars Michel Pitt, Ron Perlman and Dree Hemingway, and it will premiere On Demand this Friday. At first, it follows a young boy named Oscar (Mitchell Paulson), who commits a murder and runs away from home, leaving his childhood friend Loux wondering where he went after saving her from an abusive father. Oscar joins a band of misfit kids who pick pockets and commit crimes, but 15 years later, Loux goes looking for Oscar (now played by Michael Pitt).  

I’m not even sure where to begin with this indie crime-thriller that’s so flawed from beginning to end, it was tough to get through most of it.  The first hour deals with the younger Oscar and much of it deals with him getting in with a teen girl named Peaches and a young gang of hoodlums, led by Mark Boone Junior and Ron Perlman. It’s kind of interesting seeing Perlman playing the leader of a group of young pickpockets and thieves since he played the protector of those sorts of kids in one of my favorite movies, The City of Lost Children. That’s really the only thing those two movies have in common, as this feels like another poorly-realized attempt at… possibly modernizing Oliver Twist? (I mean, the band le by Pitt’s character are even referred to as “The Lost Boys,” so it’s obvious that Swab didn’t care too much about originality.

The sad truth is that Pitt has been fairly mediocre as an actor lately, after showing so much promise in his early days, and Run with the Hunted doesn’t really offer anything particularly new to what’s generally a pretty tired genre. Perlman is one of the better parts of the movie along with Isiah Whitlock (last seen in Da Five Bloods), and they have a fine scene together, but otherwise, the material is weak, and it leads to a dull and often outright dumb offering.

I still haven’t figured out what Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is, but apparently, it’s a spoof comedy starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams that will debut on Netflix this Friday. It also reunites McAdams with her Wedding Crashers director, David Dobkin, so I’ll definitely check it out, since it looks very funny. 

Mini-Review: I have to admit this movie seemed to come from out of nowhere. I really felt like I only started hearing about it when the trailer debuted last week, but otherwise, I had no idea that Ferrell had reteamed with his Wedding Crashers director and with that film’s romantic lead, Rachel McAdams. What this spoof comedy has going for it is that it combines a number of things I enjoy, including music and Iceland.

Will Ferrell plays Lars Erikson, one half of the synth duo Fire Saga, with his childhood friend Sigrit (McAdams), the two of them having the life-long dream of representing Iceland in the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Lars also has to contend with his disapproving father, played by Pierce Brosnan, but in general, everyone in their Icelandic town thinks they’re awful. They seem like longshots to represent Iceland in the song contest but an unfortunate incident leaves them as the only option.

We might as well get out of the way the fact that this is essentially a one or two joke comedy that follows the formula of so many other Will Ferrell movies, including Blades of Glory, but if you’re a fan of his comedy, then you’ll probably enjoy his latest offering, which he also co-wrote and produced. When Dan Stevens shows up as the Russian competitor, Alexander Lemtov, who has machinations for Sigrid, it’s pretty easy to figure out where things are going.

Either you like what Ferrell does while in full-on “idiot mode” or not, and Fire Saga’s on-stage mishaps probably offer the biggest laughs. The other level of humor involves just how silly the actual Eurovision is, even though it’s obviously more of a European thing than it is something that Americans will understand. I’ve always loved Rachel McAdams, and I generally think she’s better when she’s doing comedy, as she makes for a great counter to Ferrell’s zaniness.

In general, the movie allows actors like McAdams, Stevens and Brosnan to goof around and have a fun time being as outlandish as Ferrell.  (Just watching Brosnan trying to pull off an Icelandic accent may be worth the price of admission alone.)

Make no mistake that this is not a small movie, and it’s quite a huge production when you consider all the enormous musical numbers representing the different international contestants. I could have easily seen this doing decently in theaters, although its 2-hour run time does seem a bit frivolous since there’s also quite a bit that could have been trimmed.

As much as Eurovision Song Contest leans heavy on its main overall joke about Fire Saga being quite inept, particularly Ferrell’s Lars, I generally enjoy this type of spoof of comedy even when it ventures into very predictable territory. In the end, Eurovision Song Contest offers as many laughs as Popstar: Never Stop Stopping, even if it’s not quite as heady as a movie like Walk Hard.

Rating: 7/10

Former lawyer turned filmmaker, Cam Cowan’s documentary, Madagasikara (Global Digital Releasing), takes a look at three women in Madagascar fighting for the survival of their families and education of their children amidst domestic political instability and the poverty that’s been caused by it. Cowan made his first trip to Madagascar in June 2014 and spent four years filming and doing post on the documentary which will debut on Amazon Prime and Docurama Friday after its festival run, but will be available platforms down the line.

The Blind Melon/Shannon Hoon doc All I Can Say (Oscilloscope) has the singer returning from the grave by compiling the many videos he filmed of himself between 1990 and 1995 before his death at the age of 28.  Co-directed by Danny Clinch, Taryn Gould and Colleen Hennessy, it will hit virtual cinemas as well as record stores and music venues this Friday.  (Not quite sure how that all works, but hey, I was never really a Blind Melon fan anyway.)

Coming to Virtual Cinema on Friday is Ina Weiss’ The Audition (Strand Releasing) that follows a violin teacher named Anna Bronchy (Nina Hoss) who finds talent within Alexander, a student at the music-focused high school, neglecting her own family in the process.

Opening in Virtual Cinema Friday through almost 50 arthouse theaters across the country, including Brooklyn’s BAM, is the British-Nigerian drama, The Last Tree (Artmattan Films) from filmmaker Shola Amoo, which received a number of awards at the British Independent Film Award after its Sundance 2019 World Premiere.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will present Three Short Films by Sergei Parajanov (FilmLinc), featuring work by the Armenian-Georgian filmmaker that range from 1967 through 1988. FilmLinc will also premiere Bora Kim’s 2018 South Korean film, House of Hummingbird (West Go USA/Kino Marquee), a Berlinale prize winner set in that country I 1994, as it follows a 14-year-old through a series of romances and indiscretions.

Film Forum’s own Virtual Cinema will conclude its Alaistar Sim trilogy with the 1951 comedy, Laughter in Paradise, directed by Mario Zampi, as well as screen Zhang Yimou’s 1995 film Shanghai Triad, starring Gong Li. (There’s actually a lot of movies available via Virtual Cinema that will end this Friday, including two series of Kid Flicks shorts, so definitely try to go through the listings and catch what you can!)

This week also sees the third and final volume of Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All-Time with Volume 3 looking at “Comedy and Camp,” once again hosted by Joe Dante, John Waters, Ileana Douglas and Kevin Pollak. Some of the movies covered in this volume include Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Rock and Roll High School, Office Space, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Showgirls with guests that include Gina Gershon, John Cleese, Fred Willard, Jon Heder and many more. I really have enjoyed this documentary series, and if you’re a fan of movies that are just a little outside leftfield, this is a great addition to your library.

Available on DVD this Friday is the documentary No Small Matter (Abramorama), co-directed by Danny Alpert, Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel, which looks at early childhood education and how that has changed how kids learn, now at an earlier age than ever.

This week’s big virtual festival is the 25th Nantucket Film Festival, which will be running from June 23 – 30 with a combination of films and events like a number of “In Their Shoes..” talks with Norman Lear and screenwriter Eric Roth (both hosted by my pal Ophira Eisenberg), as well as one with improv comics, Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz, that one moderated by Michel Ian Black. Also, the Oxford Film Festival will screen two features virtually starting on Friday, Mindy Beldsoe’s The In Between and Braden King’s The Evening Hour, although the latter can only be viewed in Mississippi.You can get tickets for both on Oxford’s Eventive site.

Also this weekend, there are a few returning shows, but they’re coming to HBO Max only, and that includes the third season of Search Party and the second season of Doom Patrol, which originally premiered on DC Universe. So yeah, there’s definitely a lot to watch this weekend.

Netflix will also release George Lopez’s new stand-up special, George Lopez: We’ll Do It In Half on Saturday and the third season of the German series, Dark.

Next week, it’s the 4th of July weekend, and we’ll have more movies not necessarily in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

[cinemamablog]

2019 Favorites (So Far)

It’s time to reflect on the new movies that brought me happiness so far in 2019. Keep in mind, I’ve missed almost all limited releases this year and quite a few wide release titles. But of the films I’ve managed to see from this year’s roster, these 11 top the list:

1. Us

The horror event of the year, Jordan Peele’s second film takes us to a more abstract place than Get Out, where things aren’t so clearly cut into Good and Evil. Explanations only hurt the movie, at its best when ambiguities creep up and linger. Peele’s potential excites me: the worlds he creates take residence in reality, while always dipping into the fantastical. Also, I can’t begin to imagine the resulting kindertrauma had I heard Lupita Nyongo’s “tethered” voice as a child.

2. The Beach Bum

I’ve written about this movie before here, but let me stress the point: The Beach Bum is an underrated, gleeful, Floridian bop. Who knew a dolphin-watching tour could hold the potential for so much laughter and danger? Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar era needed to happen so wild and crazy movies like Harmony Korine’s could get greenlit.

3. Happy Death Day 2U

My mom watched pieces of the first Happy Death Day movie with the TV on mute and thought “it looked so stupid” and I was like “MOM. No. It’s DEEP, the sequel made me CRY.” And boy, did it. Happy Death Day 2U continues the humorous, fast-paced tone of the first film, but also places our heroine Tree not just in the prerequisite, life-threatening time warp, but also in the middle of a heart-wrenching conundrum. If you watch this movie while pregnant or grieving or both, it might make you cry a little or a lot. (Guess which two out of the four groups I was in this summer.)

4. Lords of Chaos

I made the mistake of googling reviews of this movie as soon as it ended. Apparently, actual Norwegian black metal fans HATE this movie. Regardless, I think it’s great, electric storytelling with one of the most realistic suicide scenes I’ve ever seen. I watched Lords of Chaos on Hulu and, as a non-metal fan, I enjoyed the life-and-death drama and toxic machismo of gothic boys who grow up into warped men. I appreciated how Kieran Culkin’s character personifies the insecurity of a boy playing gatekeeper while he himself only vaguely comprehends the darker elements of life and masks his innocent fascination with them by putting on a tough guy act. He also hides his insecurities by latching on to those grittier, sadder, more fucked up than him, as if their authenticity will rub off on him.

5. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

I heard the hype for this movie straight out of Sundance, but I still feel like this movie got sorely under-seen. One of the few movies the baby napped through while on maternity leave, the tenderness and love that went into the making of The Last Black Man in San Francisco flows off the screen. It felt like sitting with a friend on the porch, reminiscing about the neighborhoods that surrounded you and shaped your childhood. “Things aren’t the way they used to be,” you muse. “But were things ever the way they used to be?” the movie asks back. Much of our identity relies on the stories we tell ourselves, the ones our families tell around the dinner table, the ones we share at reunions with friends long lost to life’s changes. This movie tells the story Jimmie Fails chooses to share with you. Cherish it as if it were your own. Because once a story is shared, it becomes a part of yours, too.

6. Good Boys

I went out with my husband to see this movie, screening in the pricey theatre at the Promenade. (You know, the one with the fancy seats and the huge screen and special sound system.) I had had a hard time with the baby that day, still only days along as a parent to a newborn. And god, I needed a laugh. I put my trust in Seth Rogen’s role as producer and in return, Good Boys gave me a million laughs. I worried the movie would rely on the boring repetition of jokes along the lines of: “haha, young boys saying bad words and making sex jokes,” but that did not prove to be the case. With the combination of a pitch perfect script and effortlessly guileless performances, the laughs came easy.

7. The Lighthouse

I’ve already written about The Lighthouse here and honestly, I don’t have much more to say except that Robert Pattinson should’ve earned an Oscar nomination for Good Time and Willem Dafoe deserved the win for The Florida Project. Robbed, I tell you! Robbed!

8. Booksmart

I couldn’t be prouder of Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut. The script, written by four women (Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman), treats every high schooler with respect: bully and nerd, rich and poor, booksmart and streetsmart. Most movies about teenagers claim to disparage cliques and social group segregation, but they also tend to romanticize the concept of an “In” crowd. Booksmart is one of very few that presents high school the way it actually goes down: a “popular” kid is just as smart and vulnerable as the valedictorian (sometimes they’re one and the same) and the theatre kids can be just as annoying as the rich kids with too much money to burn. While the characters share more in common than they’d like to believe, Booksmart captures the universal hopefulness and ambition of high school’s final hours.

9. Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

One overly earnest child actress nearly wrecked this movie for me, but the story stuck with me through my maternity leave and into my return to the workplace. In Richard Linklater’s latest character study (based on a novel by Maria Semple), Cate Blanchett plays Bernadette, a world famous retired architect who holes herself up in the ultimate fixer upper, earning the ire of her neighbors and the worries of her husband. Where’d You Go, Bernadette? reminds me of the quote: “An artist who stops making art is committing emotional suicide.” Once Bernadette reaches a breaking point, made painfully clear to her by her husband, his secretary, and an FBI agent, her journey helps bring Bernadette back to her architectural roots. Creating functional, artful structures is Bernadette’s greatest joy, besides the miracle of motherhood. (This mama relates.)

10. IT Chapter Two

Besides the episodic pacing that slowed the movie down, I sat through IT Chapter Two in a state of constant dread. I lived through an easy childhood, but I could still empathize with the terror of the Losers Club as they return to the site of their forgotten childhood traumas. One of them never forgot the painful memories to begin with and one can’t handle it when the past comes rushing back to him. I do wish the script didn’t spend so much time on boring old Bill. And furthermore, Amy Adams was meant to play Beverly, I don’t care what anyone says. But despite my complaints, the way Pennywise manipulates both the adults’ childhood insecurities and the fears of children kept me in an emotional state that only comes from tapping into a deep fear. Or watching several people confronted with their own.

11. Greener Grass

Another entry that I’ve written about here, Greener Grass earns its spot on my list of favorites by having some of the most original art direction, the most imaginative screenplay, and syncing up perfectly with my ideal aesthetic. (Pretty pastels, quivering smiles, and danger beneath the surface.)

That’s all folks! What movies gave you joy in 2019?

[junker-town]

Sports movies that would be more fun to emulate in real life than ‘Field of Dreams’

Photo by Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post via Getty Images

MLB wants to emulate ‘Field of Dreams’ next season, and that’s fine. But if we’re being honest, big league adaptations of these movies would be even cooler.

I’ve never seen Field of Dreams. It’s probably fine? From what I gather it’s sickly sweet with a lot of I Love You Dad-type stuff engineered to exploit our too-human hearts.

The effect is apparently pretty strong, because Field of Dreams is still revered 30 year after it was released. So much so that Major League Baseball will try to bring the movie to life by making the Yankees and White Sox play in an Iowa cornfield next season.

If you build it …@Yankees. @whitesox. THE Field of Dreams. August 13, 2020. pic.twitter.com/RuBpS04BgG

— Cut4 (@Cut4) August 8, 2019

Ignoring the fact MLB’s promotional image implies Aaron Judge, Gleyber Torres, Tim Anderson, and Yoan Moncada are ghosts walking out of the cornfield, and therefore will have shuffled off this mortal coil by the time the game is played, this could be fun! Baseball is a goofy sport that is enhanced when played in goofy places. Why not!

But it does get us thinking: What famous sports movies would be even more fun to replicate for a one-off event? Here are some of our ideas. Go ahead and tell us yours via your nearest comment section and/or Twitter account. Being realistic awards you no bonus points.

Eddie (1996)

Pretty sure everyone reading this has had this fantasy. Take a vocal fan out of the stands, let them coach the Knicks, and if they win the fan gets to keep the job until the Knicks lose again. There’s no risk to a cratering team. In fact, the changeup might help break the loop of hope and letdown (and hope and letdown) that the Knicks have been stuck in for 20 years. — Louis Bien

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004)

I want this. I want this, like, yesterday. How have we gone 15 years without someone trying to take the world of professional dodgeball by storm with professional wrestling-esque characters, overwhelming production values and all the pageantry it entails?

The best part is that since this is a one-off event we can totally get Jason Bateman to do commentary and stick Chuck Norris courtside. I’m almost upset I’m sharing this information here, because I know some wealthy industrialist is going to steal this idea. — James Dator

Nacho Libre (2006)

First off, yes, wrestling is a real sport. The action might be slightly scripted but the moves are real. Imagine a random cook in a monastery becoming a luchador. It’s an underdog story for the ages. He even fights for a great cause: so the orphans in the church can eat better quality foods. It’s a heartwarming story filled with adventure and danger, mostly from the fear of having their bones broken from getting power-bombed. Picking a random person and making them a part-time luchador is an event worth watching. Especially if one of their first matches is an eight-person battle royale. Sign me up for the chaos. - Vijay Vemu

Teen Wolf (1985)

I just want to see people get eaten. — Christian D’Andrea

Air Bud (1997) or Treasure Buddies (2012)

The Air Bud archives, including its spinoff series Air Buddies and Santa Paws, is more voluminous than the Police Academy and Mission Impossible franchises put together. And you really couldn’t go wrong picking ANY of its 14 installments. SO MANY GOOD DOGS.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll narrow it down to two: OG basketball-playing Air Bud, which still holds up 22 years later, and which seems like the most logical choice if we’re talking about replicating it in real life. (Here’s one suggestion for the starring role.)

The other is Treasure Buddies, which I have never seen and technically isn’t a sports movie but gets the nod based on a Wikipedia description that belongs in a museum:

The Buddies find themselves on an Indiana Jones style adventure.

Yes, please. — Sarah Hardy

Over the Top (1987)

Don’t you want to win an arm wrestling championship? — Russ Oates

The Sandlot (1993)

The Sandlot — or more specifically Sandlot 2 (2005), where girls exist and play sports — is truly the only answer here. Since about age 7, all I wanted to experience was playing baseball at the sandlot, and that hasn’t changed as I’ve gotten older. Just make sure James Earl Jones is present. — Kennedi Landry

Brink! (1998)

Brink! is a Disney Channel original movie about extreme in-line skating and how capitalism exerts its influence on our passions. But the X-Games already exists, so we don’t need to bring skating to life, we just need ... more milkshakes to the face.

Pup ‘N Suds forever. — Michael Katz

Like Mike (2002)

I need to see a 4’ tall child dunking on NBA Players. — Tyson Whiting

Ed (1996)

In this film, Matt LeBlanc (who is basically channeling Joey, because what else is he going to do, he is Matt LeBlanc) winds up as an errand boy for a professional minor league baseball team. One of his errands has him cross paths with the titular Ed, a chimpanzee who, it turns out, is really, really good at playing baseball for unsaid reasons. Hijinks ensue. This film has everything — a fart-off, some light animal torture, a magical coin (?), and yes, a meta Friends reference — all of it terrible. In fact, we called it the worst sports movie ever made.

But am I going to sit here and pretend it wouldn’t be awesome to play minor league ball with a farting monkey? No, reader. I am not.

— Ryan Simmons

Slap Shot (1977)

Nobody wears a helmet. Fighting, while not exactly legal, is certainly encouraged. As is putting on the foil. Winning captain has to strip down to his jock strap. Don Cherry would spontaneously combust, leaving a technicolor apparition muttering about “Old Time Hockey” for all eternity. — Paul Flannery

White Men Can’t Jump (1992)

Blacktop basketball, Jeopardy!, and undefeated Wesley Snipes drip. This movie has everything anyone could ever want in a movie, and also two-on-two basketball should be an Olympic sport. — Michael Pina

Brewster’s Millions (1985)

Quasi-sports movie with Richard Pryor portraying a pitcher for the Hackensack Bulls and John Candy serving as his catcher. I’d happily work to spend $30 million in 30 days and have no assets to show for it to inherit $300 million. — David Fucillo

Space Jam (1996)

There is no better time to do this than the present. With talks of wanting to raid Area 51 and kick it with aliens, we can surely assemble a group of five extraterrestrials, have them take the talents of guys like Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, or other NBA stars, and do a live-action remake of the original Space Jam. Only difference is that LeBron James replaces Michael Jordan. — Harry Lyles Jr.

Luck of the Irish (2001)

This Disney Channel classic has a description as follows: “A teenager (Ryan Merriman) must battle for a gold charm to keep his family from being controlled by an evil leprechaun.”

Do I need to explain anything else? — Whitney Medworth

Blades of Glory (2007)

It’s really hard for me to comprehend why we haven’t seen an all-male figure skating pair since this movie came out more than 10 years ago, but hey, I’m not in the movie business. Not only was this a highly underrated Will Ferrell film in my humble opinion, the sports world deserves to see two men complete the Iron Lotus (successfully, I feel like I need to add) on live television, dammit.

— Morgan Moriarty

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

The complex allure of cursed images

Everyone has a guilty internet pleasure.

Some spice up their time online by watching porn in an incognito browser, others find solace in binge-scrolling through pages and pages of their co-workers Twitter likes to determine if they have decent morals. And there are hundreds of thousands of people who get their internet kicks by willingly exposing themselves to a daily dose of repulsive, cringeworthy images. 

While recreationally staring at photographs of shit-filled toilet bowls and insultingly tone-deaf stock images might not necessarily have been considered a socially acceptable practice pre-internet, over the past few years accounts like @darkstockphotos, @scarytoilet, and @cursedimages have made celebrating cursed images a common and even somewhat conventional pastime.

SEE ALSO: Alpaca accounts are underrated social media treasures

As dedicated meme-lovers may know, cursed images began gaining attention on Tumblr back in 2015. But after the original @cursedimages Twitter account was created in 2016, the concept of allowing oneself to be openly amused by cursed content started to become more widely embraced.

Over several months, @cursedimages exposed thousands of Twitter timelines to a fair share of visual nightmares, and though the creator stopped posting photographs on Oct. 31, 2016  — with the exception of a single image tweeted in 2017 — they inspired the creation of other accounts that are dedicated to sharing cursed content, such as the photo of Ryan McFarland's DIY guacamole doll serving dish shown below.

cursed image 9192 pic.twitter.com/fuT6bSjZKO

— cursed images (@cursedimages) October 18, 2016

The masters of cursed imagery on what inspired their craft

Shortly after the exhausting 2016 presidential election, fans of @cursedimages began to notice that the beloved account had gone dark. A little over a month later, in hopes of regaining that small and strange, but bizarrely uplifting space online, one brave soul decided to take action. 

"After the 2016 election, my Twitter timeline was a depressing mess," Sarah the 39-year-old who created @cursedimages_2, explained over email. "It made me realize how much I looked forward to their [@cursedimage’s] posts… and after a while I decided to attempt to pick up where they left off."

"I was an instant fan of the original account. The images were weird and creepy and I loved the idea of the ‘cursed image’ being numbered, as if it'd been pulled from some deep, classified archive," Sarah said. So she set out to share her own cursed images, starting with cursed image 7285 — a girl and her doll. 

cursed image 7285 pic.twitter.com/X54JvWMrtA

— cursed images (@cursedimages_2) December 27, 2016

While Sarah was busy posting photos of culinary abominations, nail art fails, creepy costumes, and NSFW optical illusions, a man named Andy Kelly was inspired to throw his hat in the cursed imagery ring. In June 2017, after years of finding amusement in the absurd collection of stock images on sites like Getty and Shutterstock, Kelly decided to create @darkstockphotos — a place where he could share the especially confounding stock images he stumbled upon with the rest of the world.

"In the depths of these sites, 30 pages into a search, I started noticing images that weren't like the others; images that were darker and more disturbing, illustrating some really heavy subject matter, but still fundamentally absurd," Kelly explained. "And so I decided to start collecting some of the weirdest, darkest, and most bewildering I found and posting them on Twitter."

pic.twitter.com/6LRutwVfzS

— Dark Stock Photos (@darkstockphotos) October 2, 2018

Now, more than 360,000 followers subscribe to see Kelly's curated timeline of stock photos that attempted to visually represent violence, addiction, depression, and a slew of other serious topics, but gravely missed the mark. He's even published a book.

Much like Kelly, personal experience is also what inspired Phil, the 24-year-old behind @scarytoilets to create his cursed accounts. During his time at university in May 2018, after using the restroom at "a particularly bad nightclub," Phil was compelled to start the Toilets with Threatening Auras Facebook page. Shortly after it gained an impressive amount of traction, he started a Twitter account.

pic.twitter.com/54ct63PFQw

— Toilets With Threatening Auras (@scarytoilet) August 11, 2018

"When I set it up it seemed quite funny to explore something so incongruous," Phil said. "And when I delved into the wealth of images that are relevant to the topic is [it] just became even more entertaining." 

Turns out Phil’s obsession with whimsical, creepy, and downright repulsive porcelain thrones was contagious. And there are apparently so many cursed facilities in the world that he now gets the majority of the images he posts from direct messages.

The unusual charm of the cursed image

By nature, many "cursed images" are not meant to be enjoyed. Oftentimes the content they contain is intrinsically repulsive, and therefore, shouldn’t necessarily trigger delight within us. Yet, somehow, so many of them do.

In a 2016 article, New York Magazine’s Brian Feldman noted that the subjects in the images aren’t always what provokes a lingering double take, rather sometimes it’s the poor quality of an image that leaves onlookers with a cursed vibe.

Feldman argued that “Cursed images draw their power not from the actual objects pictured, but from the fact that photos like these are bygone products of antiquated technology.” And while that’s definitely true in certain cases, if you were to show me a photo of a hairless cat staring into a pot of raw chicken, a cloven hoof inexplicably sticking out of a toilet bowl, or a sobbing child holding a gun, I would consider each of those images "cursed," even if Annie Leibovitz shot them using the world’s most expensive camera.

cursed image 594 pic.twitter.com/N3ciIqa3zw

— cursed images (@cursedimages_2) January 4, 2019

pic.twitter.com/JI7R1SyZaO

— Toilets With Threatening Auras (@scarytoilet) January 11, 2019

While there are definitely exceptions, the majority of cursed images shared by these accounts do seem to be at least lightly fucked up. So what is it that makes people feel it's totally and completely OK to smash the like button on them? 

For all three of the account creators I interviewed, the main draw to cursed images is humor, albeit very dark humor.

“Social media can quickly get depressing and it really does help to break it up a bit with other types of content,” Sarah of @cursedimages_2 explained. “For me, the cursed images posts provided an unexpected moment of comic relief. And I think cringe-y stuff kind of makes us feel a little better about ourselves… in a harmless schadenfreude kind of way."

Kelly agrees, adding that the dark stock photos he shares stray so far from reality that he can’t help but find them comical.

"What I find so fascinating, and hilarious, about stock photos is how blunt and artless they are. These photographers will take something serious like, say, seasonal depression. Then they'll illustrate it by having a guy sit in front of a Christmas tree with a bottle of whiskey and a pistol,” he said. “The most serious subject matter is rendered absurd by the lens of the stock photographer, and that is an endless source of amusement for me. They don't reflect reality in any way: they're like some alien's twisted, third-hand approximation of the human experience.”

pic.twitter.com/kj5VtLFJWn

— Dark Stock Photos (@darkstockphotos) September 10, 2018

And though it's occasionally vile, Phil's toilet account also helps people flush away negativity. “I’ve been messaged a few times through both Twitter and Facebook… people telling me they like following because it breaks their timeline or newsfeed," Phil said. “I think it’s nice to see humour in something most people wouldn’t normally. The images usually aren’t really ‘threatening’ but just silly entertainment."

Cursed content gets personal

While humor is definitely a distinct part of the charm surrounding cursed images, the allure is different for everyone, and not strictly confined to a single factor.

John Fio, a 28-year-old explained via Twitter DM that what he likes most about accounts like @cursedimages and @scarytoilet is that "they evoke two eras" of the internet: pre-internet and early-internet.

“Because of the washed-out flash photography, old furniture, and wallpaper you often see, and grainy film quality which obscures the image in fun ways,” many of the images take Fio back to a time before the internet even existed. But sometimes he recognizes images shared on the cursed account from posts in the early 2000s, so they serve as fun throwback posts.

Meanwhile, Lala, a 33-year-old cursed content connoisseur, appreciates the fact that the images make her think.

"I think it's appealing because it speaks to the part of our brains that usually can only begin to imagine the kind of 'horrors' you see there, but they’re real!" Lala said over Twitter DM. "Some are funny, and some are truly disgusting, but most are something we'd never conceptualize in our own imaginations. Like if you asked me to make up a cursed image I think it’d be hard, you just know it when you see it. Almost like a Schrödinger’s cat type thing."

For Zoë, a 28-year-old fan of @cursedimages_2 and @scarytoilet, they feel cursed content "appeals to an organic aesthetic" they've had all their life.

"I grew up in a small town in the Rust Belt and spent most of my free time as a kid playing in old ruined buildings and finding weird shit at thrift stores,"  Zoë explained. "I think these things are very much art projects in a way and i think they began to appeal to a wider audience because of the cultural moment we're at in America and around the world, where it kind of seems like everything is falling apart... and 'cursed content' is kind of a sick, gallows take on consumerism in many ways."

How cursed is too cursed?

While they're far from the darkest spaces on the internet, cursed images and the accounts that share them can be seen as inappropriate to some. The creators are fully committed to posting all things weird and mind-boggling, but on occasion even they encounter lines they don't feel should be crossed. With great horror comes great responsibility.

"There are a lot of 'dark' stock photos that are just matter-of-fact portrayals of really horrible stuff. For example, there's an inordinate amount of images depicting violence against women on these sites. And there's nothing funny about it, so I avoid it," Kelly explained. "To make it on the Twitter feed, an image needs to have something surreal or absurd about it. A touch of the preposterous. And I do like that whenever I post an image that is more dark for the sake of dark, it gets a lot fewer RTs than the others. The readers of Dark Stock Photos are surprisingly discerning."

cursed image 1118 pic.twitter.com/9rOAzrk7r9

— cursed images (@cursedimages_2) November 22, 2018

Sarah of @cursedimages_2 agrees, noting she tries not to post any images that depict "someone getting seriously hurt" or "intentionally hurting an animal."

"There are always gray areas, but the bad ones are usually pretty obvious. In other cases, every once in a while the cringe factor may just be too strong. If I’m on the fence, I’ll text my sister with an image and ask 'too cursed?'" Beyond that, Sarah explained she's also against posting anything that's been Photoshopped because if it's not a real life situation it's not really that cursed. 

The question of crediting images

Aside from a few careful considerations, owners of cursed accounts can pretty much post whatever they like, whenever they like. It sounds like a pretty sweet gig, but there was one concern that came up when talking to fans.

While @darkstockphotos often screenshots watermarked photography from websites, occasionally including some way to track down the original image, many cursed accounts seem to curate photos from the web without giving the original creators proper credit.

"I think that since a lot of the images are stolen... there is an interesting contextual question there about whether these accounts are ethical," Zoë said.

When the original @cursedimages was active it appears an @uncursedimages account attempted to provide attributions to as many of the cursed posts as possible. But nowadays, as most messages are sent from fans, or sourced from message board, the process of properly crediting has fallen by the wayside, which, if you ask me, sounds a bit cursed in its own way.

It's possible that in certain cases the sources of these images are intentionally hidden to protect the people in them or those who posted them, but in Phil's case, the choice not to credit images was a personal one he made when the Toilets With Threatening Auras Facebook page started to gain popularity.

"I used to give credit when some wanted, but I started getting others claiming that they took the photo and it became a bit of mess actually trying to authenticate who the pictures are really taken by," Phil said.

While he has taken several photos down after people called him out for not crediting them, he noted that "most of the time there is little complaint."

As for Kelly, he does his best to include some nod to each image's origin in his tweets. "I'm personally very sensitive to stuff being stolen and re-shared without credit online, so if I felt like Dark Stock Photos was crossing the line in that regard, I wouldn't do it," he said.

Kelly also noted the fact that he makes no money from the Twitter account, and that before making his Dark Stock Photos book, his publisher was sure to purchase licenses for around 100 images they included.

"Of course, if one of the photographers complained I'd take it down straight away," Kelly assured us. "But that hasn't happened yet."

Finding light in the darkness

Ultimately, cursed images are meant to challenge people to look beyond the often hideous exterior and find the humor within. Sure, sometimes the images are fucked up, but they’re fucked up in the best way.

We assume the majority of these cursed images aren’t being shared maliciously, which helps us justify laughing at them. And though the issues most dark stock photos attempt to visually portray are real and serious, we know the photographs are staged and the models aren't in any real peril. 

For those reasons, we allow ourselves to enjoy these incredibly fucked up images with the same grotesque delight we feel when watching Dr. Pimple Popper make pus volcanically erupt or a rat drag a slice of pizza across the floor of a dirty New York subway station.

The accounts are definitely not for everyone, but if think you might be able to find even an ounce of joy from looking at a cursed image through the comfort of your computer or phone screen, give it a shot.

WATCH: Ariana Grande's tattoo flub continues to get roasted in hilarious internet meme — All the Memes

Stock image credits:

[Weird rock twins: DonNichols/Getty Images][Spaghetti twins: harpazo_hope/Getty Images]

[jonboudposts]

A Christmas Carol in a Time of Moral Bankruptcy

2018 marked the 175th year since the publication of A Christmas Carol. 2019 sees among other things a new BBC television adaptation and stage version at The Old Vic. Even if you have never read the book, chances are you are familiar with Charles Dickens’ story, or at least parts of it. The storytelling and the moral core are woven into the culture in Britain and America; the story of a man who lives to make money and dominate others finding out, during the course of one Christmas Eve, that his eternal soul will be damned if he does not changed his ways.

There are literally more versions than I can (be bothered) to count. From TV adaptations to classic films to stage productions to school plays; modern-day updates and cartoons; Alistair Sim, Albert Finney, Jim Carrey, Patrick Stewart and Scrooge McDuck have all played Ebenezer Scrooge.

But the reason I am writing this is to discuss the love and hate that this story brings out in me every year; there is nothing I am saying that as not been said before. Yet I feel compelled to say it still.

The story itself is easy to admire, built like so many stories by great writers on simple yet deep story-telling traits and character arcs. It is inventive, with the use of fantasy to push real life struggles into sharper contrast, promoting sympathy; empathy and sadness.

We have our favourite versions; I love the Muppets with Michael Cane giving genuinely I think one of his best performances (singing aside) and the TV version with Patrick Stewart; an underrated one that dials down the schmaltz and shows the hardness of poverty, with a tough performance by Stewart to match. His is a genuine transformation from vicious capitalist to caring human and a very physical one; as he goes from looking like a piece of flint to slowly softening his features as he grows into a better man.

Such performances are celebrated and cherished, making many of those lazy pointless lists every year of favourite past cultural thing you relive because we are incapable of making anything new.

But all of this is perhaps part of the problem I have with the story too. The way we can watch, cry even, at how someone can change their ways and then fail to do anything ourselves for the very people that Dickens wishes us to care about. The story was inspired when Dickens read an 1843 report describing terrible living and working conditions in the Industrial Revolution in Britain. He could read the same thing today and find a callous population sifting through piles of shit to find the pile that does not smell as bad, so they feel superior to each other.

In this world, we can clearly see real Scrooges, except unlike their fictional counterparts, they never learn nor change. They do not need to. Our society and the way culture is organised worships the rich and punish the poor for their perceived failure.

The rich are in fact totally cut off from humanity.

So why should these greedy bastards change? We are never going to make them. The real Scrooges utterly destroy our lives all year long; then expect every Christmas to put that aside and wish each other meaningless platitudes of good will.

The biggest enemy in the story is the carelessness fundamental to ignorance and the damaging power of want. It makes the most vulnerable what they are; victims.

While I do not think the original story of A Christmas Carol is meaningless sentimentality, I think too many experience it exactly that way; feeling elated at the goodwill at Christmastime vibe and stepping over the people in the street on your way out the theatre or cinema. In London for instance, you could attend a performance at a theatre like the King’s Head (formally in Islington) and step out to a modern London as lacking in human warmth as Dickens dreamt of. Up the road is the Union Chapel church, who run a winter shelter, providing food and shelter for those in need. Every year the church has a screening of that other hope-filled story for the season, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Modern Britain still likes to present A Christmas Carol every year despite it teaching us less and less and the years roll by. The world this story is now told in looks like this:

One and a half million people use foodbanks each year

More foodbanks across Britain than MacDonalds

1-in-3 children in poverty; that is 14 million Britons living in relative poverty

Growing benefit claimants in work

Reduction in life expectancy for the poorest

120,000 deaths of people thrown off benefits, including the disabled

The richest 1000 families resident in Britain, which includes bankers and financiers, have doubled their net worth during the austerity era.

Non-British children being charged for citizenship (since defeated in the court, no thanks to the British people).

To top it all, this information being widely known before the 2019 General Election and still the population gave the Conservatives a majority despite them causing all this misery.

Councils in some parts of the UK have embarked on clean up (or you might argue cleansing) campaigns targeting the homelessness in town centres with Public Space Protection Orders (PSPO); homeless people are routinely fined hundreds of pounds and in some cases sent to prison for the ‘repeat offence’ of asking for money. Local authorities in England and Wales have issued hundreds of fixed-penalty notices and pursued criminal convictions for “begging”, “persistent and aggressive begging” and “loitering” since gaining strengthened powers to combat antisocial behaviour in 2014, by Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Rough sleepers are harassed and landlords (as Mr Scrooge was) have gained far greater powers to evict tenants sooner and with less reason.

Charities and solidarity organisations give the option to buy a coat or hat or gloves for a refugee or homeless person; they however are in no doubt this is a sticking plaster; the purchasers I am not so sure about. It reminds me of something Naomi Klein said about the present order insisting on finding some way to buy our way out of the problem; be it poverty or climate change or a bunch of other shit.

The party that our present Prime Minister leads contains MPs who openly admire the Victorian era and all the social wankery of top-hatted toffs passing the peasantry in the streets. Plus we have sociopathic self-haters like Priti Patel hovering over the Human Rights Act with a metaphorical knife.

Refugees are another group not afforded decency; we deny people their rights, violate those we pretend to give them; punish them for the crime of crossing a boarder and even threaten communities that protect them. The Conservative Party manifesto for 2019 targeted traveller communities with attacks on their rights, including increased powers to take their property.

A child will become homeless 'every eight minutes' in the UK (Shelter, Dec 2019) or suffer insecure accommodation; meanwhile schools have an average of five homeless children.

Ignorance for sure; want for the same people as ever; dire need for change not answered.

Our societies do not embrace those less fortunate than us; we blame them for their own predicament and indulge in poor hate. There seems no bracket of people we can rely on, as even children's writers like JH Rowling indulge in one of modern society's most vile vices, trans-hate.

The empathetic are a dying breed.

Around Christmas people will often give more to charity, commonly Crisis as they run their huge shelters over the festive period in various cities to feed and shelter the increasing numbers of homeless people across Britain. Keeping up with the state of poverty in general and homelessness in particular is no easy task. One reason is we forget about the needs of people the rest of the year and only the magic of Christmas makes them give a shit for a week. This is just liberal conscience-wash if you do not back it up with demands for change in the system, which the British public have just shown they are unwilling to do.

Yet the system – capitalism in the only form it really exists – is embodied by Ebenezer Scrooge. The end of the story is pretty clear; Scrooge stops being cold and heartless; he will no longer allow the market to run without interference. He rejects capitalism for something wholly more humane.

Much of the problem in A Christmas Carol, like It’s a Wonderful Life later on, is the dehumanising effects of capitalism. The individual change required in Ebenezer Scrooge is a rejection of his hardcore individualism and embracing the needs of others, to the point of saving the life of Tiny Tim; his banker counterpart Mr Potter must be defeated by George Bailey and his supporters (although like in the real world, Potter is never jailed). At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is a miserable man beset by loneliness and isolation. His nephew refuses to give up on him though, always inviting him from Christmas in his warm, happy home despite constant rejection by his uncle.

The rampant free market gave us Ebenezer Scrooge as an everyday occurrence, year round with no ghosts to haunt them into decency. In the real world, Ebenezer Scrooge does not change his character no matter what happens. He is Philip Green, who dodges taxes, sells off a business knowing it will collapse soon, tries to abandon paying staff their pensions and pours scorn on the elected officials trying to hold him to account for the way they look at him. Green in particular managed the near-impossible in 2018 of seeming even more repulsive, with revelations of abuse accusations from many former BHS staff; from bulling to sexual harassment along with homophobia and a general staggering lack of respect for his staff. He is scum and will never reform.

In the 1980s we had Scrooged, a non-traditional adaptation starring Bill Murray as Frank Cross, a ruthless TV executive whose every cruelty was rather too enjoyable, along with his abusive Ghost of Christmas Present giving him much-needed kicking.

At the end of the film, Cross invades the set of the live adaptation of A Christmas Carol that his over-worked staff are producing, proclaiming that the meaning or power of Christmas is how for one night a year ‘we become the people we always hoped we would be’; that is, we smile more and are nicer to each other. This sums up the 1980s very well and why progressive and socially just forces lost that particular war so badly. This piss-weak response to be a little nicer to each other is why people die in the street. The film is also an example of the age; doing all this good for one night a year (how 1980s).

In Michael Moore’s first film Roger and Me, we witness the General Motors chairman of the title Roger Smith at the GM Christmas party, giving a speech that includes extracts from A Christmas Carol. This is inter-cut with footage from Flint Michigan, the town devastated by GM when they outsourced their workforce to cheaper parts of the world. While this pompous twit quotes Dickens and the wonder of Christmas, a mother and her children are evicted. That scene says more about our culture than any other I can think of in any film.

It is well told but worth remembering that in 2008, when the perfect economic system crashed, the people were responsible were bailed out and did it all over again, with the consequences being completely directed toward the least responsible yet again. The horror this unleashed has never relented.

From a consumer perspective, Christmas never ends. As a postman, I deliver to people massive amounts every day and it is never enough. They answer the door, perfectly politely, take the packet(s) and discard them as they sign and/or shut the door. These wonderful items are given that much thought; just the latest play thing or dress up. Literally discarded before opening because this in one of many deliveries probably that day. I am nothing to them; just a cypher to bring their life a meaning it never gains; I used to like being part of a public service, keeping people connected and possibly educated; now I just feed an addiction. This hyper-consumption will bring the system down again and whose fault will it be this time?

A Christmas Carol’s message is one that every Christmas we seem to get further away from. It is used to stroke the egos of the guilty and make them think nothing else needs to be done. Just be a bit nicer to the people you ignore the rest of the year, maybe even slip them a fiver (although not your postman or other service provider anymore it seems). You do not challenge poverty and homelessness by simply not liking it or giving a bit of pocket change, just like you cannot challenge racism and sexism simply by existing in a certain position socially or economically. However you feel, someone is still sleeping on the concrete tonight.

A Christmas Carol is less a morality tale and more a fantasy; but for the consumer not the writer. In the Britain of 2019, we have no moral right to tell this story. No version should be staged; no adaptation on TV; no school play. It should not entertain, nor pander to the desires of selfish consumer-obsessed grown-babies to make them feel a little better. This country has just voted to make the poor suffer more; to keep the status of 1-in-3 children suffering poverty – which will grow – and destroy the National Health Service. Tiny Tim is just a failure and when he dies, we just move on.

You have no right to a Merry Christmas, nor to discuss god as anything other than a punchline. The fix is in and no one cares. Misery for all is the name of the game today and if you want better, you are a fantasist.

Britain is a horrible little shithole of a country. Mean and worthless, in love with a horrific dream of decrepit empire in a world becoming dangerously hot.

Merry Christmas? Fuck you and your family.

[mrmichaelchadler]

The Best Performances of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival

You know how much you loved Elsie Fisher in “Eighth Grade,” Lakeith Stanfield in “Sorry to Bother You,” Toni Collette in “Hereditary,” and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie in “Leave No Trace”? All of those performances and even more great 2018 acting turns premiered at Sundance in January of 2018. So who gave the performances of Sundance 2019 that you’ll be talking about all year long? These are 12 you’ll want to keep on your cinematic radar.

Awkwafina in “The Farewell”

On the heels of her breakout role in “Crazy Rich Asians,” Awkwafina shows off a new dramatic side in Lulu Wang’s deeply personal movie, “The Farewell.” Here, she plays Billi, the Chinese-American granddaughter of a woman who’s been given a fatal diagnosis but whose doctors and relatives won’t tell her. As the most westernized member of this family, Awkwafina channels the complicated tensions between the two cultures, the immigrant fear of never being able to go home again and of what it means to love someone so much that you’ll go along with the charade of pretending they’re not dying. It’s an emotional yet restrained performance from a comedienne who broke out by playing the most outrageous character in a large ensemble cast. (MC)

Adam Driver in “The Report”

The role of Daniel Jones in Scott Z. Burns’ story of the torture report that revealed the lengths the U.S. government went to under the guise of stopping terrorism could have been a thankless, blank slate of a part. So much of “The Report” is about what Jones discovers that the man himself could have been lost in the paperwork he created. But Driver never lets this happen. He maintains a confident, believable character, never stealing focus from what really matters but also not getting lost in the storytelling. It’s the kind of un-flashy performance that won’t get the credit it deserves for anchoring an entire movie. In other words, it’s what Adam Driver is increasingly good at doing. (BT)

Kelvin Harrison Jr. in “Luce”

The players in Julius Onah’s stylish drama “Luce” are pitched amid various dualities and uncertainties. The title character is no exception—Luce is a star student, a model son to his adoptive parents and a source of inspiration to his community. Then again, he might also have disturbing leanings elsewhere. For anyone who’s seen Kelvin Harrison Jr. in the unnerving “It Comes at Night” (also a film on trust, strengthened by the perspective of the audience), his spot on performance here as a teenager that carries both guilt and innocence with equal persuasiveness won’t come as a surprise. It’s a performance that’s chilling and disarming all at once, while Harrison Jr. swiftly holds his ground against veterans like Octavia Spencer, Tim Roth and Naomi Watts with both nuance and meticulous delivery. (TL)

Zora Howard in “Premature”

In Rashaad Ernesto Green’s romantic drama, “Premature,” Zora Howard plays Ayanna, a teenager who’s coming-of-age and still trying to figure out things in her life. During the summer, she falls for a music producer, Isaiah (Joshua Boone), in a swoon-worthy, whirlwind romance — the kind you think about years after it ends. But few things survive long when you’re seventeen, and Howard smoothly works her way through Ayanna’s deeply felt emotions. From recreating that warm glow in her cheeks during the couple’s honeymoon period to the stiff body language in reaction to their splitting relationship, so much of Ayanna’s story comes from Howard’s expressions and body language. Howard’s sensitive performance feels reminiscent of Kerry Washington’s role in “Our Song” and the independent spirit of Ariyan A. Johnson’s character in “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.” It’s not a showy performance, but one that sticks with you because of its subtlety and familiarity. (MC)

Noah Jupe in “Honey Boy”

Alma Har’el’s gutsy “Honey Boy” seems like a wall-to-wall therapy session: for its writer Shia LaBeouf (who tells his own condemned life story) and for anyone who’s been raised in the hands of abusive parents. In it, the young actor Noah Jupe—among this year’s sharpest breakthroughs of Sundance—gets caught in the crossfire of it all with a rare opportunity. Playing the young, somewhat fictionalized Shia, he picks up the phone in one scene (it’s mom on the other end) and relays his parents’ fuming words back to each other with startling anger, precision and defeat, just like a grown-up. In another scene, he steps back down to being a child, and begs his father to become a better parent. Jupe steals this movie, displaying range and virtuoso well beyond his young years. (TL)

Riley Keough in “The Lodge”

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s horror film was one of the most divisive flicks at this year’s Sundance, but even the film’s detractors agreed that Riley Keough does great work in it. It’s an incredibly difficult part in that Grace needs to remain something of a question mark. Not only is she the potentially evil stepmother that our two child protagonists don’t want in their lives, but she may be crazy too. Playing a character with a questionable grip on sanity is an invitation for most performers to chew the scenery but Keough grounds Grace in a way that makes her far more interesting and the final act of the film far more terrifying. It’s just another great turn from an actress who isn’t afraid to choose challenging, unpopular roles, and seems to impress more every time she does. (BT)

Kiki Layne in “Native Son”

The fascinating Ashton Sanders got a great deal of press for his leading turn in the opening night film, but the performance that lingers in my mind more is that of Kiki Layne, who announced her future-star status in “If Beale Street Could Talk” and really cements that here in just a few scenes. Bess could have easily become a two-dimensional archetype, the put-upon girlfriend who exists more as a sounding board for the leading man than a real person. But Layne imbues every choice she makes with realism, adding to the poignancy of the final act. Much as she did with her underrated work in “Beale,” she never makes the wrong choice here. I can’t wait to see what she does next. (BT)

Jonathan Majors in “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”

Joe Talbot’s “The Last Man in San Francisco” mixes symphonic filmmaking with the quiet dreams of its characters, especially for its two leads, Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors). Majors fashions an impeccable earnestness out of a sidekick who could have been lost to quirkiness, and paints a vivid image of a man who clings to his red notebooks and especially the ideas inside, while monologuing to himself on a pier, as if figuring out what means most. Though Fails is the fulcrum of the story, it receives some of its most beautiful moments from Majors’ performance, like when he earnestly yells at a mirror while attempting to try on the aggressiveness of other black men—it’s a funny and tragic note on the story’s sensitive portrayal of black masculinity. Majors’ masterstroke, however, might be a performance sequence in the third act that contains all of the film’s themes, like Linus’ monologue in “A Charlie Brown Christmas Special,” while displaying all of his energy and charisma. Majors’ performance is acting as storytelling in the best ways, and one of many flourishes in Talbot’s unforgettable film. (NA)

Alia Shawkat in “Animals”

Shawkat’s brought many a playful character to the screens large and small, but few roles have allowed her to play such a classy raconteur as she does in Sophie Hyde’s “Animals” Like a poem-filled, sequence-wearing Withnail, Tyler (Shawkat) is the impish answer to Laura (Holliday Grainger), a flailing writer who’s the straight man I to this Withnail. The two best friends are comrades in drugs and parties, but just as they’re approaching their 30s and Laura begins dating a pianist, their close friendship suffers a rift. Although the movie follows Laura more closely, Tyler also experiences her own awakening, giving Shawkat room not just to play a wildcard character but also an emotionally vulnerable person who wants her close friend back in her apartment to share a drink. (MC)

Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer in “Give Me Liberty”

There are a lot of faces and voices that are crammed into “Give Me Liberty,” Kirll Mikhanovsky’s claustrophobic, heartwarming story about a group of people who are united on a van. But one of the most memorable performances belongs to Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer, who enters into the story as one of the clients that Chris Galust's medical transport van driver has to pick up. But she proves to be an excellent, scene-stealing straight-woman against the chaos of the other riders on the van (Vic’s Russian elders, it’s a long story). You get a full sense of her life before and after the times Vic pick her up, as it shows her charisma across expressions of comedy or drama. (NA)

Honor Swinton-Byrne in “The Souvenir”

With her soft, childlike facial features and expressive eyes, Honor Swinton-Byrne (Tilda’s daughter) embodies “The Souvenir’s” Julie—an ambitious film student about to lose her innocence in the hands of a toxic relationship—with a rare kind of exactness. Throughout, she moves with the grace and reluctance of someone acutely aware of both her misfortunes and privileges. As Julie falls deeper into the overwhelming rabbit hole of a young, life-defining love, Swinton-Byrne dials up her helplessness to heartbreaking effect, turning Julie into a real-life character you will both want to shake up and non-judgmentally protect. Having given perhaps the most mournful performance of Sundance, Swinton-Byrne is sure to walk in her mother’s shoes and put her unique stamp on every film she will be in. (Good news: a sequel for “The Souvenir” is already in pre-production.) (TL)

Geraldine Viswanathan in “Hala”

Geraldine Viswanathan is well on her way to being a star, and her lead role in Minhal Baig’s “Hala” should accelerate the process. Playing a Muslim teenager of first-generation immigrant parents in Chicago, this role is a marvelous display of how Viswanathan can present the process of contemplation, an excellent fit for a character who can internal as tries to navigate the world. She has a striking precision with emotion, offering a lot to be read between the lines in a way that registers as raw and compelling whether it’s in thinking about how she feels about her first major sexual encounter, or observing her parents’ marriage slowly start to fall apart. It lets the majority of “Hala” play out with more subtlety, honoring the quiet ways in which maturity finds and changes us. (NA)

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