Isaac Feldberg
What comes through most resonantly in Apples is its envisioning of a society starting over, and its suggestion that a clean slate, accepted honestly, might not be the worst thing.
In wrapping up Fantasia, I focused on The Five Rules of Success, Come True, and The Dark and the Wicked, three ambitious genre titles that have stuck with me long since their credits rolled.
Movies, great or awful, are essential comforts in these nightmarish times. And in my second dispatch of the Fantasia fest, I bring better tidings.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a bit of a wonder, a careful nightmare that demands rapt attention even if repeated viewings do little to assuage its eeriness.
The Mortuary Collection is a dark diamond in the rough of this year’s Fantasia so far, a canny ode to horror history that pays respect to its elders without appearing dated or derivative.
La Llorona’s deepest horrors flow from real history, from the atrocities inflicted by powerful men and the institutions established to ensure they get away with it.
The Rental chugs along predictable genre rails, its characters settling into the expected “types” as screws are gradually turned on them by whoever’s surveilling from a distance.
Sharp, simple, and well-attuned to the hopelessly grim tenor of these past few years, The Beach House knows how doomed we all are, says we deserve it, and prays that, after the tide comes in to wash us out, the rest will be left to flourish.
My mind is busy considering the presence of two distinctly engrossing thrillers of sex and violence set within the adult film industry, one a vividly romantic neo-giallo fairy tale, the other a discomfiting, tragicomic spiral into murder and depravity.
A B-movie par excellence, Greta’s the kind of unhinged and yet fiendishly well-calibrated genre fare that rarely gets afforded the attentions of a director as accomplished as Neil Jordan.
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