While it must have been personally frustrating for director David Cronenberg, the fact that it took almost 20 years for him to get his latest film, Crimes of the Future, onto the screen was probably for the best. Originally titled Painkillers, Cronenberg’s return to funky, disturbing body horror was first set to begin production in 2003, but the project stalled out until last year.
What he’s made feels like a snapshot of our current moment. I suspect Painkillers wouldn’t have captured the feel of its time, had it been released when initially planned. Crimes of the Future’s fidelity to our present malaise is probably due in part to the rewrites and revisions that undoubtedly took place in the interim between Cronenberg’s first draft and the start of production.
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It took Gaspar Noé almost dying to transform his usually grim and nihilistic take on life into something wholly new with Vortex, the director’s seventh feature film. Well, maybe not wholly new. His latest is still grim and nihilistic, but there is an empathy present that boarders on humanistic. That’s a quality that might seem antithetical to describing Noé’s work, but what appears in only trace amounts – and only if you’re really engaging with his films – in previous of the director’s titles like Enter the Void and Climax takes an uneasy spotlight in Vortex, even as it works alongside Noé’s more signature preoccupations like dread and terror.
In early 2020, the Paris-based Argentine filmmaker, who is 58 years old, suffered a near fatal brain hemorrhage which ultimately helped inspire the story for Vortex. The opening line of text for the film, “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts,” leaves no doubt as to what’s on Noé’s mind with this picture.
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The critical rap on most DCEU films – especially those with Zack Snyder attached, like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – is that they’re too tonally dark. They’re often too visually dark, for that matter. While titles like the aforementioned Batman v Superman left me feeling beaten into submission and desperate for a way out, the new take on the Dark Knight from director Matt Reeves, The Batman, had me mesmerized, fully in thrall to the world Reeves created. His film is every bit as dark as Snyder’s, tonally as well as visually. (Cinematographer Greig Fraser, who also shot Denis Villeneuve’s gorgeous 2021 adaptation of Dune, listed Gordon Willis’s muted look for The Godfather as inspiration for The Batman.)
So, why did The Batman work for me where BvS failed? Improbably, I think it’s because of proximity to reality. Snyder’s films are bleak, depressing, and oppressive. They also don’t feel particularly connected to the real world in any tangible way. It’s easy to disconnect from them because the worlds created within them feel divorced from our own. The Batman is so hypnotic – and, consequently, so disturbing – because Reeves, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig, has crafted a world that isn’t ours, but that feels (to my great dismay) like it will be ours in another three to five years. That feeling is what fueled most of my discomfort and sick fascination while watching The Batman.
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As with his 2016 film, Jackie, director Pablo Larraín has crafted another emotionally charged fable centered around a powerful woman and the impossible circumstances in which she finds herself. I use the word fable to describe Spencer because that’s how the movie describes itself in its opening seconds. “A fable from a true tragedy,” are the words we see as the movie begins. It’s a clever way for Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight to immunize themselves from charges of historical inaccuracy.
The word fable also readies Spencer’s audience for something fantastical. Larraín has made a biopic by way of psychological horror here; his picture attains an emotional truth by tying its point of view to the heavily subjective mental and emotional state of its protagonist, Diana, Princess of Wales.
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There are two bravura sequences in director Brandon Cronenberg’s waking nightmare of a film, Possessor. Brandon, the son of legendary horror director David Cronenberg, proves with Possessor, his second feature after 2012’s Antiviral, that he’s up to taking on the family business: creating mind-bending cinema centered around queasy body-horror special effects.
Possessor follows Tasya Vos, a contract killer who works for a company with a revolutionary process for carrying out its assignments. Vos is a possessor; using the company’s technology, her consciousness is implanted in a host body to do the killing. After each hit, Vos is pulled out of the host body, leaving that poor soul to deal with the consequences of a murder that he or she had no choice in committing.
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It started with a Fresnel lens. If you’re wondering what that is, then we have something in common; so did I when I first read the term. For his second feature effort, The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers knew he wanted the 19th century technology – developed specifically to make lighthouses visible by ships from farther away than was previously possible – as the centerpiece of his film. Just like with his directorial debut, the hypnotic 2015 film The Witch, Eggers was obsessed, and achieved, the most meticulous period accuracy for The Lighthouse. It seems blasphemous to use the word masterpiece so early in his career, but with his painstaking attention to detail, his eye for striking cinematic imagery, and his exploration of the human psyche, that’s just what Eggers has produced with both The Witch and now with The Lighthouse.
Set in the late 1890s and making use of sources like Herman Melville’s writings and actual lighthouse-keepers’ journals for its idiosyncratic dialog, Eggers hasn’t just re-created the time period with The Lighthouse. He’s brought it back from the dead.
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I’m doing something a little different with this week’s review. As I explain below, I have recently fallen down the rabbit hole of Twin Peaks, so I took advantage of re-watching the feature film Fire Walk with Me as a chance to add to my Revisited feature. That’s where I’m going on the record with a movie I’ve seen before but never written about. I’m also mixing in a funny story about the first time I watched the movie with my partner Rachel.
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Provocateur director Gaspar Noé has put a waking nightmare on screen with his newest movie Climax. The film is unsettling, nauseating, confusing, and, in the end, a singular viewing experience that only Noé could unleash upon the world. The director responsible for the equally singular Enter the Void – which I revisited as the second part of a double feature with Climax, a night I won’t soon forget – uses nihilism the way Bob Ross used happy little trees, often and with great satisfaction. There is no lesson to be learned here. Climax isn’t exploring any deeper truths about the human condition. Noé’s only goal seems to be to shock and disorient his audience. In that way, Climax is a complete success.
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I’m blaming screenwriter David Kajganich for Suspiria’s biggest failures as a remake of a cult classic. I caught up with the original – Dario Argento’s bonkers Italian giallo horror film from 1977 – almost a year ago. That film overwhelmed my senses in the best possible way. The hallucinatory color palette, grand guignol-style gore, and seminal score from prog-rock band Goblin collaborated to give me an unforgettable experience.
Director Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake is too concerned with making the movie about something.
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It would be reductive of me to call Yorgos Lanthimos the new Stanley Kubrick. The Greek director responsible for the provocative films Dogtooth, Alps, and my initiation into his twisted imagination, The Lobster, is nothing if not a unique talent. Still, there are certain undeniable Kubrickian flourishes in his new film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Chief among them are a penchant for inserting nihilistic black comedy in otherwise bleak subject matter, and his facility with patient, beautiful camera movement and framing. Sacred Deer is one of the most challenging, most disturbing films I’ve seen this year.
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If you want to find the most polarizing film of 2017, look no further than Darren Aronofsky’s baroque experiment in psychological horror, mother! (which after this point, I’ll refer to simply as Mother). This is a movie that’s impact I suspect will diminish on a second viewing. Unlocking the secret at Mother’s core, which will probably come at a slightly different point for just about everyone seeing it, robs it of some of its power. Aronofsky has made pure allegory here, using an extreme dream-logic aesthetic that is nothing if not simultaneously hypnotic and terrifying.
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