I suppose it’s almost impossible to use an exuberant color palette for a film situated in a Slavic country. Every time the story takes place in such a communist or ex-communist country, the screen is filled with depressing colors. The closer one approaches Russia (the motherland of communism) the more gray, grizzled, and duller the…
In Rambo II and Cobra, George Pan Cosmatos directed two Sylvester Stallone films which could hardly be more 80s; these movies stand as two of the more memorable examples from that decade’s glut of violent action cinema. Cosmatos died in 2005, but with Mandy his son Panos revisits the era of his father’s greatest successes…
The first thing that came to my mind while watching Apostle, was the movie The Witch. It takes place in the same time period. Here, too, an old-fashioned sounding English is spoken. And it’s also a religion-tinted theme. The biggest difference with The Witch is that I thought that one was rather boring and not…
The Coen brothers are steeped in the lore of Westerns. Even leaving aside their direct remake of True Grit, many of their films – I’m thinking Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn’t There and No Country for Old Men – tap into the tropes of the genre. So it makes a lot of sense that…
The Tick is a show I love a bit too much. I don’t know why exactly, but I enjoy it more enthusiastically than I perhaps should. Maybe it’s the fact that this light-hearted series plays with the tropes of the superhero genre in a Deadpool-like way. Or maybe it’s the assured writing and direction. Or…
Each year ends with a bang. You’ll have the end-of-year festivities and people party themselves into the New Year. But when it’s about movies, this one created an end-of-a-film-year-bang. Frankly, I didn’t expect too much of it. But maybe my prejudice about Sandra Bullock has something to do with that. I readily admit that I’m…
One of the brightest talents in television creates one of the most audacious series of the year with Maniac. That talent is Cory Joji Fukunaga, the mind behind the acclaimed first season of True Detective, has crafted an exquisitely mind-bending experience. Of course, it helps to have A-list actors Emma Stone and Jonah Hill in…
I was really curious about Slender Man. Not that I expected anything spectacular. But the photos with this cult figure, which popped up on the internet, were rather intriguing. Not really scary but mysterious. A faceless figure with disproportionate limbs who appears in the background while observing children playing. A kind of Pied Piper of…
Alfonso Cuarón has never been easy to pin down. The Mexican director has slipped effortlessly between genre films (Children of Men), Hollywood blockbusters (Gravity) and human dramas (Y Tu Mamá También). Now Cuarón draws the strands together in Roma, a film that’s paradoxically both his most ambitious and his most intimate to date. Before getting…
At First Light is a minimalist sci-fi movie from Canada. Although it offers a rather disappointing outcome and they could have done more with the powers Alex (Stefanie Scott) has at a certain moment, it’s still worth watching. For the umpteenth time, it’s clear you don’t need a huge budget to make a fascinating film….
