It’s understandable that Alain Guiraudie won the best director of Un certain regard at Cannes this year, since for the most part L’inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake) is a very tight piece of work, effectively exploring the time and place of a single location and milieu, charting the uncertainties that blossom as a […]
2013
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Cinematic-Romantic In ‘Vic + Flo Saw A Bear’
Vic + Flo Saw A Bear is something like an expansion on Denis Côté’s last, the strictly observational non-documentary Bestiaire (2012), although that in turn was a distillation of his favoured practice of looking at slightly odd characters shut away from the world. In Curling (2010) and Carcasses (2009), for example, it was by their […]
Cinema Fearité Presents ‘Strangler Of The Swamp’, A Chilling Campfire Tale With A Quick And Dirty Feel
In modern Hollywood, swamps have emerged as effective go-to settings for horror movies. Wes Craven’s Swamp Thing is easily the most recognizable example, but the locale was also featured in Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. Even more recently, the revisionist slasher Hatchet trilogy explored the trend, as did the throwback monster movie disaster Creature. The use […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: The Complex, Troubled, And Intriguing ‘Closed Curtain’
Jafar Panahi continues to defy the 20-year ban on film-making imposed on him by the Iranian government with a new feature, co-directed and starring his colleague and frequent collaborator Kambozia Partovi, and it is an intriguing magnification of his last illicit achievement, This Is Not A Film (2011). That title was wittily, bitterly disingenuous, whereas […]
AFI FEST 2013 Movie Review: Greatness Amongst Carnage In ‘Lone Survivor’
The sound of bones crunching against a tree, as a man’s body tumbles down an unforgiving hill; not once, but twice. This is the sound that haunts you after watching Lone Survivor, superseding the gunfire, explosions, helicopter propellers, and painful screams of four men being ambushed in Afghanistan by Taliban forces. It could easily go […]