Film
The vicious, virtual, voyeuristic, and vicarious are on view at this year’s Camden International Film Festival.
Reviews of three films at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that draw connections between class, violence, and politics.
Though the images are half a century old, the chaos, treachery, and courage recorded bear a chilling relevance to circumstances today in our country and in democracies around the world as right-wing efforts to overturn democratically elected governments proliferate.
Cinephiles revere a group of movies, known as the Ranown cycle, that starred Randolph Scott and were cannily directed by Budd Boetticher.
“The Mother and the Whore” is a film about failure: its characters are pushed towards misery not only by their own flaws, but by the failure of the ‘60s to deliver a promised revolution.
The horndog plot of this wild comedy: two unpopular queer high school students start a fight club to have sex before graduation
Three gruesome films by debut directors put the horror back in vacui.
“Bad Things” tries out a lot of ideas, many of them good, but a crisis in identity results in slapdash execution.
Billed as a queer woman’s spin on “The Shining,” “Bad Things” is a much more entertaining film in concept than it is in execution.
Film Commentary: The Heights and Depths, the Rise and Fall, of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”
In the end, what strikes me most about “Vertigo” is its melancholy, its aura of grief, its mood of inevitable, irredeemable loss.
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