[Sci-fi] cinema has been notoriously prone to cycles of exploitation and neglect, unsatisfactory mergings with horror films, thrillers, environmental and disaster movies.” So wrote J.G. Made inside a New Jersey warehouse, where scenes were shot against blue screens on which digital landscapes were superimposed, Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s The Wanting Mare conjures a vivid, naturalistic sense of place out of ones and zeroes. Cut 25 minutes from CODA and it could almost be any other film about teenagers looking to distinguish themselves from their parents, with caricatures of well-meaning adults and friends. The skies and seas appear infinite throughout, but in the end, they’re nothing but mirages. That’s ultimately not the filmmaker’s fault, but rather the marketing strategy. Henry is the son of Mayor Blumenshine, who is unaware of his superhero identity as much as Zoey's. Determined to ensure that we feel consistently wonderful while watching CODA, Heder elides virtually any indications of hardship: Ruby doesn’t have to work for her voice, which instantly sounds trained, and her lack of money or connections to Berklee is brushed away with a few lines of dialogue. Henry is a memorable monster, played by Ciarán Hinds with a bravura mixture of smug entitlement and oily needfulness that’s weirdly and unexpectedly poignant. In ways both terrifying and ludicrous, the film explores how such essential modern tools as laptops, phones, and Skype can be turned against us by unseen forces. Really, on Southland Tales, we needed to make about six hours of story. The sole member of her family who can hear, the teenaged Ruby has served as an all-purpose translator and employee for many years, getting up before dawn to help Frank and her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), catch fish, and then negotiate with the dealers at fish markets who are ripping everyone off. In Segunda Vez, we’re forced to experience a succession of sequences like a sleuth searching for a conceptual through line. And some of our favorites are currently streaming on Netflix. Some rely on complicated special effects, others use none at all. That’s part of the challenge of doing a project like this: You have to build a time machine and travel back into the past. Then there’s Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which transfigures Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s briskly paced novella Roadside Picnic into a slow, mesmerizing journey into an uncanny space. These individuals include her "Gramps" non-superpower grandfather; her closest friend, Henry, a "Boost" superhero who invents devices that strengthen his superhero abilities; and a friend who gives moral encouragement, their seagull sidekick, "Kipper." If the anime series’s finale was a psychological breakthrough, End of Evangelion is the relapse, an implosion of self-annihilating revulsion and anger rendered in cosmic terms. The film is a nostalgia act for sure, particularly for The Hitcher, but it injects that nostalgia with something hard, sad, and contemporary, or, perhaps more accurately, it reveals that our hang-ups—disenfranchisement, rootlessness, war-mongering, hypocritical evasion—haven’t changed all that much since the 1980s, or ever. Southland Tales is better left unexplained (if it can even be explained), just experienced as a collage of spectacularly staged aughts-era anxieties. It just feels like now’s really the time, if we’re going to do it, to try and engage with expanding the story and really finishing it with all the resources we have today. Ed Gonzalez, The masterful final panel in Roman Polanski’s remarkable “Apartment Trilogy,” The Tenant surpasses even Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby in its portrayal of claustrophobia and dissipating sanity. It certainly doesn’t help that the main characters are so thoroughly underdeveloped: Star and Barb’s exaggerated Midwestern politeness and cheery innocence can be endearing up to a point, but Wiig and Mumolo’s undercooked screenplay doesn’t give them much personality beyond these broad strokes, and to the point that you may have trouble telling them apart. In one of the greatest mad-scientist speeches ever delivered by a character in a horror film, Henry explains that his cloned wife (Abbey Lee) is only real to him when he destroys her. It’s astonishing to think that “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” was written before the emergence of the iPhone, the “cloud,” and ultra-advanced video games, not to mention before online conspiracy theories became mainstream. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. These possibilities inform life with meaning, perhaps rendering everyday banalities and terrors manageable. One of the most jarring, and poignant, moments in Feast takes the shape of a traditional documentary sequence that teases out the poetic and life-affirming dimension of viruses. Director: Rodney Ascher Distributor: Magnolia Pictures Running Time: 108 min Rating: NR Year: 2020, Review: Two of Us Undercuts Its Romance with Quasi-Thriller Elements, Review: On the Count of Three’s Brutal Absurdism Enlivens a Familiar Scenario, SXSW 2015: The Nightmare, God Bless the Child, & Sailing a Sinking Sea. Golden was adapted into an anime, Persona 4 The Golden Animation. It’s set up as chapters four-to-six of a six-chapter story, where the Cannes version is set up as much more dreamlike but has a complete narrative arc because it has more scenes and character development. Susco makes full use of the restrictions of the film’s format, employing multiple windows and digital glitches to juice up the suspense. [Many] catastrophic events occur either on the day of a presidential election or the immediate aftermath with the policies and events that occurred in their shadow. We weren’t even allowed to bring The Box to a festival. That’s what I’d tell them on a technical level, but on a thematic level, I would tell them it’s a portrait of the aughts, the aftermath of 9/11, and a kaleidoscope of paranoia. In this case, Cronenberg softens King’s kink and gore, honing the narrative to entirely reflect the yearning for “normalcy” that hounds Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) as a car accident and prolonged coma transform him from a meek, gawky schoolteacher into a tormented, decidedly Walken-esque eccentric who resembles a rock star and proceeds to alter people’s futures. Moira wants to be on the boat, as does her adopted daughter (Yasamin Keshtkar). Nick Prigge, Writer-director Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy. When you see Boxer and Krysta [Dwayne Johnson and Sarah Michelle Gellar] discussing their script, they’re going into great detail, very excited about the roles, and what the world’s like. High quality Meme gifts and merchandise. Religious, sci-fi, and psychosexual imagery intersect in chaotic, kaleidoscopic visions of personal and global hell, all passing through the shattered mind of the show’s child soldier protagonist. An analog man in a digital world, Cronenberg invests a narrative along the lines of his father David’s eXistenZ and Christopher Nolan’s Inception with psychedelic imagery and jolts of gouging, bone-splitting, unambiguously in-camera body horror that rival anything in modern cinema for tactility and pure outrageousness. Is there something psychological that keeps drawing you back beyond the mistimed or mismanaged releases to the films? I would just love, more than anything in my whole career, to be able to finish this project. Selim Mourad also plays with ideas around the diseased queer body by weaving divergent visual grammars in Agate Mousse, channeling Guillaume Dustan’s fearless indecency, Hervé Guibert’s radical vulnerability, and Joaquim Pinto’s diaristic essayism. There are two books—well, there’s many books—that you see in Donnie Darko. When you’re writing something ahead of its time like Southland Tales, are you keeping in mind the audiences of the time? Unfolding over the course of a long day, the film follows parents as they’re driven to kill their children in a mass outbreak of violence. ", "Starbeam Season 2 Release Date, Cast, Netflix, New Season 2020", "Netflix Originals Coming to Netflix in March 2021", https://ew.com/movies/coming-to-netflix-october-2020/, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=StarBeam&oldid=1006477820, 2020s Canadian animated television series, 2020s Canadian children's television series, Canadian children's animated superhero television series, Canadian children's animated science fantasy television series, Canadian children's animated action television series, Canadian preschool education television series, Animated television series about children, Pages using infobox television with editor parameter, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Captain Fishbeard begins stealing shiny objects all over Somerset on Fun Food Friday, and it is up to both StarBeam and Boost to try and stop him from stealing the, Zoey is struggling to master a move for her dance recital, so Henry gives her some high-tech, Zoey's mom has contracted the super sniffles and can't control her powers. And the carnage, when it arrives, is staged with an aura of guttural bitterness that refuses to give gore-hounds their jollies, elaborating, instead, on the desolation of the characters committing the acts. I think we’re kind of trying to come back to a sense of normalcy. As viewers, we’re welcome to consider the persistent motif of walls collapsing, subterfuges dissolving, and rugs being pulled out from still more rugs. 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We hadn’t even gotten to that point yet, the light was pretty far down at the end of that tunnel at that point. There’s an expiration date on all of us, but a lot of us are still in our prime. Cautious optimism is the guiding principle of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, which has opted, like other festivals since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, for a “hybrid” model. CODA is most appealing during these scenes, capturing the drudgery of the everyday and the nourishing bonding ritual among this family. Through the decades—and subsequent crazes for color and sound, stereoscopy and anamorphosis—since that train threatened to barrel into the front row, there’s never been a time when audiences didn’t clamor for the palpating fingers of fear. Best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, the film never feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends. The premise also has an inviting bluntness: A few years into the future, global warming slips out of control, and humankind inadvertently initiates an ice age in its attempt to correct it. On a cocktail-fueled first night at their Vista Del Mar resort, Star and Barb have a wild encounter with Edgar (Jamie Dornan), a handsome but insecure younger man. Most of the characters and relationships are so woefully underdeveloped that these entirely arbitrary, sub-Shyamalan rug-pulls are unable to have any impact on the story. That’s a treacherous world to live in because you’re judged and sometimes condemned based on an opening weekend or a per-screen average. If such strides can be made in a few decades, what kind of illusions, or existences, can be fashioned in centuries or millennia? There’s no sense of benevolent normalcy in Mom and Dad, or of a control state that’s to be eventually restored or at least fought for. Once they return, however, the narrative, which had been building slowly into a haunted-house attraction, with menacing noises at the door and ominous stories about Siberia’s Tunguska Event of 1908, realigns and turns diabolically quizzical, reimagining Mike Cahill’s Another Earth as a taut parlor game of possible parallel lives. How would you introduce Southland Tales to someone who doesn’t know its backstory? 2024 sounds like a great deadline, and I would love to meet it. There’s a cargo ship that leaves the island once a year, with some room for passengers, but tickets are so hard to get that people kill for them. The film does have a feeling of loose, cartoonish unpredictability that prevents it from getting too one-note, but there’s very little in the way of imagination on display here. In a vignette where a battle of attrition between warring neighbors is effectively won by someone who owns the biggest, most obnoxious sound system, we see how waves of technology place barriers between people, and how for these well-to-do characters, their joie de vivre is derived from causing drama. The Wanting Mare finds a young woman, Moira (Jordan Monaghan), wandering through Whithren’s landscapes by day and rocking out to eight-track tapes at night in a mostly empty warehouse. Our aesthetic perception is linked to our perception of Henry himself, so that the film becomes a study of empathy through aesthetics. Bowen, When Hideaki Anno ended Neon Genesis Evangelion, his elaborate analogy for his own untreated depression, with a moment of calming, redemptive group therapy, the backlash he received from fans who wanted a cataclysmic climax was overwhelming. And when it does try to delve inside its protagonist’s mind, Fear of Rain fails to conjure up a single memorable image, exploring the unconscious’s capacity for abject horror with about as much courage as a mediocre Goosebumps novel. Most significantly, she addresses the way plants can accept the symptoms caused by light viruses so that by the time the plant is infected with higher viruses it will carry on as normal, working with the pathogen in a sort of collaboration. Ascher also samples Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, Alex Proyas’s Dark City, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, and most inevitably the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, a seismic exploration of the dream obsession that drives a vast portion of pop culture. My movies have never been particularly audience-friendly, but they’ve aged well with the test of time. The film is most notable for its evolving visual concept: Each car takes one closer to a representation of the world as it presently works. In the process, Feast exposes the impossibility of untangling fact from fiction. The only thing Leyendekker eroticizes in the film is coffee, in a sequence where one of the accused makes espresso and froths milk with the most delectable of frothers. Bowen, Before the flourishing digital age paved the way for social-media naval-gazing, YouTube, and selfies galore, The Blair Witch Project foreshadowed the narcissism of a generation, its success unsurprisingly paving the way for an army of imitators that failed to grasp the essence of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s terrifyingly singular and effortlessly self-reflexive genre exercise. This new world with streaming platforms, you’re not as beholden to the risks of theatrical box office revenue. A Glitch in the Matrix reaffirms that Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express. Ascher interviews a particularly deranged Matrix obsessive, Joshua Cooke, who murdered his parents in 2003 with a 12-gauge shotgun when he was 19, convinced that he was living in a simulation and was, presumably, looking for a disruption to awaken him. Across a set of encounters between upper middle-class people, relationships become increasingly fleeting and mutual understanding more elusive (shades of Hong Sang-soo). Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express. In its close-ups on ordinary objects like shoes and seatbelts, shot with the same carnal expectancy as the food, it reappropriates sexual dynamics for a locked-down culture that sees the same domestic objects day in, day out. So that was always our intent. Writer-director Sian Heder’s CODA, like Sound of Metal, stuffs an examination of deaf culture into a crowd-pleasingly inspirational formula. “All I do now is love my parents as I wait for them to die and for me to be knocked out by it,” he tells us. Its finale is the most fully annihilative visualization of the Rapture ever put to screen, a mass death rendered as cathartic release from the hell of existence that, in a parting act of cruelty, leaves the broken, suicidal protagonist alive to bear witness to oblivion.