Meeting up with old friends brings back memories of the good ole days, a chance to catch up and congratulate each other and relive old times, and the perfect setting for a rose tinted reunion is a far away cabin in the wilderness , with no distractions and no neighbors to distract or keep a watchful eye. The only problem, having not seen your old school friends for some time there’s no guarantee that everyone still has all their own marbles. Will this weekend in the Alpines be a few beers and burgers or a weekend of psychological meltdowns and digging up buried true feelings?
Director: Simon West Starring: Dominic Cooper, Austin Stowell, Gemma Chan, Connie Nielsen, Thomas Kretschmann, Tom Felton, Derek Jacobi. UK. 1h 34m
British director Simon West has a huge action highlight reel consisting of succulent titles such as Con Air, Lara Croft Tomb Raider, The Mechanic, and even the mega blockbusters, The Expendables 2. But his latest addition, a smaller scaled Brit Espionage Thriller, Stratton, seem to have all the right components of a big budget action flick but just no heart and soul, which is bound to leave many viewers feeling cheated.
Backwoods horrors seem to have traveled from the deserts of the southern American into the cold forests of the north, incorporating indigenous folklore along the way. The Silencing tries to keep itself in the here and now, offering a grimy armchair detective mystery with icy drama, some daring thrills and a fathers promise to find his missing daughter at all costs.
Director: Kristian Levring. Starring. Mads Mikkelsen, Eva Green, Eric Cantona, Mikael Persbrandt, Douglas Henshall, Michael Raymond-James, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jonathan Pryce.USA/Denmark/South Africa. 1h 32m.
Westerns have long been a tough genre for me, I grew up watching them with my mother and grandfather and I really started to hate them. I suppose any entertainment that makes the adults lose interest in how cute you are will do that to a child’s psyche.. the only entertainment was playing with Gramps while he slept through some of the classics. Later on in life, when I got over the trauma, I rediscovered Spaghetti Westerns and I started to accept the genre back into my life, unless there’s a Mexican revolution a haunting Ennio Morricone soundtrack and less white people attempting to make believe that America has always been white, then the better things start to get. I’ve loved the reassurance of darker and more graphic horror westerns such as Seraphim Falls (2006), Brimstone (2016) and the almost instant cult classic Bone Tomahawk (2015), which have won me over. But without having a mythical foe or a revolution, there’s a striking grasp of The Salvation which has a more believable story of two immigrant brothers just trying to get ahead in the wild west and meeting ugly adversity.
AKA February Director: Osgood Perkins Starring: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, Lauren Holly, James Remar. USA. 1h 33m
After an influx of “The Exorcism of [insert name here]” movies, Osgood Perkins hits back with an edgy and slow drifting art house approach to the saturated possession genre that insists on it’s audiences full attention; as it pulls them through a mid winter drama filled with tense dark undercurrents that chilled the cast before filming and has made it’s fans think and overthink the terrifying and mind bending finale.
Perkins struggled to get the film released despite it being loved at many film festivals, but after a change of name from February to the more sinister Blackcoats Daughter. Something which sounds like it came from an old rhyme or has a deeper historic meaning but it simply doesn’t. It’s these little touches which helped to confuse the audience and adds to the films mystery, Perkings does analogise that the blackcoat could be a priest or the devil, both have often been credited for dressing in black but he just simply liked the sound of the words together and it’s up to his audience to make what they will of it. Perkins has a talent for creating deeper mythologies within the narrative of his film projects and allowing interpretation, while this openness could be seen a wild genius, it can also become grating Continue reading The Blackcoats Daughter (2015)→
An eerie stop motion short from American filmmaker Adam Rosenberg, argued to be very similar to a short called Crooked Rot from David Firth, but as much as it had a similar creepy feeling to it, the message and sentiment is entirely different. The film starts out with an innocent looking mannequin head. Nothing too strange about that. Then a peculiar $1 appears and all hell breaks lose
y personal take on the film is that a person no matter how innocent can become corrupted by money and greed and that in turn it does indeed change a person dramatically. As soon as the money appears “Manny” changes in order to pursue it, the dollar gets ingested and goes up in smoke possibly an indication to how long the wealth lasts. The head is emptied and the mouth silenced, the Manny has now become a slave to the wage, one of the mindless single voiced consumers, as soon as the money is gone the “Manny” changes again, wanting to speak out it gets engulfed in flames.. The poor rarely have a voice..
It’s a cold and unnerving tale that could be interpreted in many ways. This is obviously just my take on it, obviously a great favourite as it’s dark accompanied by uneasy soundtrack and made me think Adam seems to have a lot of black humor about him and an impressive catalogue of work under his belt already, someone to look out for, although don’t expect too much like this, as the style had changed dramatically but still very surreal.
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