Thriller Archives - Page 11 of 67

Mandy (2018) + Suspiria (2018)

October 24, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

MANDY
***/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn
directed by Panos Cosmatos

SUSPIRIA
****/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Panos Cosmatos's Mandy is an old-fashioned acid trip of a movie–like if Head were directed by Rob Zombie. Indeed, the film it owes the most to is Zombie's exceptional mood piece Lords of Salem. It's already gained a fair deal of cult cachet (as well as a surprising/not-surprising box-office run), not the least for the best use of King Crimson since Children of Men (prog-rock is having a good 2018 between just this and Private Life), for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's bliss-out score, and for an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance augmented by Viking berserker rage superpowers. Not for nothing is Mandy a period piece opening with Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, dissolving into a pixie-font title card setting the scene as "The Shadow Mountains" in the year of our lord, 1983. Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is drawing "kinda like a jungle temple" in the remote home she shares with Red Miller (Cage). In bed, they talk about their favourite planets (hers: Jupiter, for the storms; his: Saturn, probably–no, wait, "Galactus") as Cosmatos bathes them in neon reds, then pans up into the Northern Lights arrayed above them. They canoe and it's so beautiful, the wave patterns and the blue, so blue it's almost lurid. Fire, then, a screen of it. All the elements will be represented here as metaphor for the completeness of their bond. It's not subtle. Now's not the time for subtlety.

Big Kill (2018) + The Toybox (2018)

October 20, 20182018, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

BIG KILL
*/****
starring Christoph Sanders, Jason Patric, Michael Paré, Danny Trejo
written and directed by Scott Martin

The ToyBox
*½/****
starring Mischa Barton, Jeff Denton, Brian Nagel, Denise Richards
screenplay by Jeff Denton
directed by Tom Nagel

Watch The Toybox on iTunes

by Walter Chaw Triple-threat Scott Martin’s Big Kill–he’s the writer/director/co-star of the film–is an old-timey western for people who think Silverado is an old-timey western. Really what it resembles is a distended episode of “Alias Smith & Jones”, where a pair of raffish, well-meaning ne’er-do-wells spend time in various clichés interacting with a stock company of NPCs that populate movies like this. The film opens with irrepressible Travis (Clint Hummel) fucking the daughter of snarling Mexican generalissimo Morales (Danny Trejo, who survives this one), thus inaugurating a boring gunfight between the Mexican army and Travis and his partner, Jake (Martin). Jake wants to know what’s taken Travis so long. Travis wants Jake to know that it’s not “screwing,” it’s “making love.” It’s that kind of movie. They’re chased across the Texas border so that Michael Paré can make a cameo, and then on to the titular town of “Big Kill,” where cityfolk greenhorn Jim (Christoph Sanders) wants to make a new life now that his wife was lost to him in childbirth. When Jim shares that with his buttermilk-scrubbed girlfriend, it sounds an awful lot like his wife was a fetus, but, you know, there you have it.

BHFF ’18: Empathy Inc

October 15, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/**** written by Mark Leidnerdirected by Yedidya Gorsetman by Walter Chaw More earnest than truly clever, Yedidya Gorsetman's shoestring Empathy Inc is a competently-made (save for one dialogue sequence where the actors are clearly on different sets) and reasonably efficient take on the Vic Morrow instalment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. If it ends up resembling more the Primer version of "The Prisoner of Benda", well, so be it. The picture starts well enough, as corporate middle-manager Joel (Zack Robidas) finds himself the scapegoat of a start-up's collapse, destitute and forced to move in with wife Jessica's (Kathy Searle) demonic…

BHFF ’18: Boo!

October 14, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/****
starring Jaden Piner, Rob Zabrecky, Aurora Perrineau, Charley Palmer Rothwell
written by Luke Jaden & Diane Michelle
directed by Luke Jaden

by Walter Chaw Luke Jaden’s feature-length hyphenate debut (he co-wrote the script with Diane Michelle), Boo! is an insular family drama framed against a chain-letter premise involving one religious family’s decision not to participate in paying a Halloween prank forward. What follows are a lot of jump scares and some on-the-nose dialogue that could have benefited, I think, from more workshopping. The problem is that the picture wants very badly to be about the toll of religious fundamentalism on the development of children (a well-taken point, of course), but it becomes the proselytizer itself with its straw-man of a bible-thumping patriarch, James (Rob Zabrecky), set up to bear the brunt of the film’s sins. His constant references to the “good book” feel unnatural, rehearsed, what a movie evangelical would say. When his wife Elyse (Jill Marie Jones) reveals a tragedy in their past and her unwillingness to go to James at a point of crisis because of what he would say, it raises the question of how it is these people ended up together in the first place and why, exactly, Elyse has fallen from the flock, if in fact she’s done so.

FrightFest ’18: He’s Out There + Hell Is Where the Home Is

October 13, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

HE’S OUT THERE
**/****
starring Yvonne Strahovski, Anna Pniowsky, Abigail Pniowsky, Ryan McDonald
written by Mike Scannell
directed by Quinn Lasher

HELL IS WHERE THE HOME IS
***/****
starring Angela Trimbur, Janel Parrish, Jonathan Howard, Fairuza Balk
written by Corey Deshon
directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw Centring on the manipulation of a mysterious and sinister children’s book, Babadook-style, Quinn Lasher’s sleek, technically proficient home-invasion/slasher flick He’s Out There takes another page out of that film’s playbook by putting kids (sisters Anna and Abigail Pniowsky) uncompromisingly and repeatedly in mortal peril. The set-up is a wilderness retreat to the lake house in the woods, where mom Laura (Yvonne Strahovski) is headed with her moppets in tow, her workaholic hubby Owen (Julian Bailey) promising to meet up with them later. This leaves our heroine alone with her kids and that creepy kids’ book along with a story told by yokel Shawn (Justin Bruening) about horrific happenings at the ol’ house, plus a missing kid (Ryan McDonald) who never was found, now that you mention it.

FrightFest ’18: Pimped

October 7, 20182018, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

***/****
starring Ella Scott Lynch, Benedict Samuel, Heather Mitchell, Lewis Fitzgerald
screenplay by David Barker and Lou Mentor
directed by David Barker

by Walter Chaw David Barker's hyphenate debut Pimped reminds of Danny Boyle's feature debut Shallow Grave in that both are twisty, twisted chamber pieces revolving around bad behaviour that spins, mortally, out of control. It's sexy and sleek, shot every bit like an Adrian Lyne film obsessed with the mating rituals of the rich and beautiful. Opening in a lurid party scored to Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away," it intimates that what's to follow will be a bacchanal, unbridled in its indulgence in earthly delights. And it very nearly delivers on that. Worth noting that Pimped is just one of several of this year's films that seems invested in the conversation about women's empowerment and men's proclivities towards violence, sexual or otherwise. What's interesting about this conversation in horror is that it's a fairly common one. Of all the things it's on the vanguard of, horror has always been aware of the imbalance of sexual politics. With the topic now in the mainstream, small wonder that this genre, so often derided by even its more opportunistic creators (Danny Boyle among them, as it happens), has gained some measure of popular esteem. The more ignorant cultural critics have even been emboldened to opine that horror is not horror. Those who know, know that horror was always more likely to have these difficult midnight chats.

Hold the Dark (2018)

October 4, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgård, James Badge Dale, Riley Keough
screenplay by Macon Blair, based on the novel by William Giraldi
directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw “There’s something wrong with the sky,” someone tells Russell (Jeffrey Wright). They wonder if he’s noticed it. Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark is about mythologies–how they explain the capricious chaos of the world in terms understandable, using images that are universal to us. Mother, father, child, dark, blood, fire. He tells all of this complex story of revenge, betrayal, and the hunt in these broad archetypal strokes; it’s a film written on a cave wall, and at the heart of it what are a movie and a cinema but images animated by a flicker to be told in the company of others? Hold the Dark is beautiful and spare in the way that only things told in primal, innate gestures can be, and its setting, an arctic Alaskan wilderness (played by Alberta, Canada), reflects that austerity. When there is dialogue, it’s doggedly insufficient to the task of description and explication. Russell is a wolf expert and talks about how he sees a pack eating one of their young–something called “savaging” that happens when the environment is wrong in some way. It seems counterintuitive to devour the young, but sometimes, Hold the Dark suggests (without saying it), it can be an act of love.

FrightFest ’18: Seeds

October 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

*/****written by Owen Long & Steven Weismandirected by Owen Long by Walter Chaw Owen Long's Seeds aims for the bleachers, for which it should get some credit. It's a navel-gazing exercise in which Marcus Milton (Trevor Long), an aging Aschenbach with very particular appetites, returns to the family reserve one eternal twilight to act as babysitter to niece Lily (Andrea Chen--disastrously uneven) and her little brother Spencer (Garr Long). There, he pops pills and sees tentacles the film presents as a metaphor for the repressed sexual dysfunction he nurses within what appears to be an Asian fetish, what with the…

The Predator (2018)

September 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key
written by Fred Dekker & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw Shane Black's The Predator is about cultures built around, predicated upon, and interested in the deification of violence and dominance. It talks about how an entire alien civilization owes its technical and biological evolution to the refinement of tools used explicitly on big game, not unlike how our own technologies owe their evolution to porn and forever war. One running joke has a scientist–an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn), natch–saying that the things aren't so much "predators" as they are sports trophy hunters, like bass fishermen, say, but of course calling them "predators" is "cooler." All the men in the room agree. The only ones who don't are the woman and a suicidal black soldier (Trevante Rhodes)–not coincidentally, the characters most likely to be predated upon (woman, black, mentally-ill, even veterans) by their own culture. Being in a life-and-death struggle with a predator is cool because it's a question of survival for both; being the victim of one of Donald Trump's inbred children is not cool because it's some rich douchenozzle armed to the teeth hunting you for something to mount in the den of their third mistress's second winter home. The Predator, in other words, has much on its mind, despite that its execution is a trainwreck–a trainwreck overwhelmed by an eve-of-premiere scandal whereby Munn revealed that Black had enlisted one of his buddies, a convicted pederast, to play a scene with Munn as a perv who harasses her while jogging, without informing the production of his past. The layers of irony to this thing are like unpacking an onion.

TIFF ’18: Widows

September 14, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF, UK

***½/****
screenplay by Gillian Flynn & Steve McQueen, based on the novel by Lynda LaPlante
directed by Steve McQueen

by Bill Chambers Sorry, Psycho. Killing off one movie star halfway through isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Killing off three movie stars in the first five minutes. Widows casts Liam Neeson, Jon Bernthal, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the husbands, and while the title would seem to give away that they aren’t long for this film’s world, watching established leading men bite it so soon still creates an undeniable moment of cognitive dissonance. It’s thrilling to see co-writer/director Steve McQueen use his cachet to these subversive ends, not to mention apply his formal sophistication to the crime movie. Which isn’t to say he elevates it (we’re talking about a genre that counts Anthony Mann and Jean-Pierre Melville among its pioneers)–more that Widows offers respite from a glut of John Wick wannabes and Neeson’s own assembly-line thrillers. So, Widows. Viola Davis plays the rich one, Veronica. She lives in a swank condo overlooking Chicago that seems to have taken on the icy gleam of the bachelor pad from McQueen’s Shame in the absence of Neeson’s Harry, an idealized vision of whom haunts Veronica’s imagination. (These scenes play like the distaff version of Neeson’s The Grey.) Harry’s partners were not as well off, and their wives, Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), need money desperately enough that Alice’s own mother (Jacki Weaver, perhaps inevitably) tells her to become a paid escort. Harry, it turns out, owed money to a crime lord, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who’s now running for city council against golden child Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell). Manning wants Veronica to pay up, so she commits to robbing Mulligan and thus finishing what Harry started, enlisting Linda and Alice as her partners. None of them are career criminals, yet Veronica figures that if she can tailor the heist to their individual strengths, they just might pull it off.

TIFF ’18: Dogman

September 12, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Thriller, TIFF

****/****
starring Marcello Fonte, Edoardo Pesce, Nunzia Schiano, Adamo Dionisi
screenplay by Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso, Matteo Garrone
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Walter Chaw About four scenes into Matteo Garrone's Dogman, I wondered if he was going to be able to keep it up: the invention, the escalating tension, the breathless feat of being something entirely novel. I've never seen anything like Dogman. It's a crime film, a tender picture about a father and his daughter, a look at poverty, a look at addiction and maybe mental illness, a critique of masculinity at its terminal extremities, and a withering conversation about what friendship can look like between two men. It's a film that feels like a fable sometimes; like neorealism at others. It's shockingly violent and then surpassingly tender. There's a monster in Dogman, too, and while it's easy to hate and fear him, there are moments where I felt myself hoping that someone could reach him. I could even feel myself wanting his approval. The picture is unusually smart about the human condition, even though its intelligence appears to be alien in nature. It's impossible to know from one minute to the next what's going to happen in Dogman, which isn't to say it makes no sense but rather that it makes perfect sense, once it happens. It's brilliant.

Telluride ’18: Destroyer

September 3, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Thriller

**/****
starring Nicole Kidman, Tatiana Maslany, Sebastian Stan, Toby Kebbell
written by Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi
directed by Karyn Kusama

by Walter Chaw A laconic noir that promises for a while to be fierce before settling into being familiar, Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer drips with style and atmosphere even if its destined-to-be-lauded central performance by Nicole Kidman lacks the same mystique. She plays LA Detective Erin Bell, a woman beset by demons of alcohol and regret that have left her looking cadaverous: rotted gums and hollow eyes. Most of the performance is fright make-up, the rest Kidman speaking breathily, heavily, and maybe overdoing the drunk swaying and slurring a tad. Erin’s daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) hates her, of course, and has taken to hanging out with much-older street tough Jay (Beau Knapp), probably just to piss her off. Erin’s estranged husband Ethan (Scoot McNairy) seems nice, though, if scarred by her ferocious temper and penchant for vomiting and passing out, usually in that order. Kidman has been extraordinary in small, personal films like this. Her work in Birth is generational; Dogville, too. But Destroyer is too programmatic to make much of an impact. This kind of image-slumming is too familiar by now, and there’s not one moment where it’s not Nicole Kidman doing a performance up there. Pity.

FrightFest ’18: A Young Man with High Potential

August 31, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Germany, Thriller

***/****
starring Adam Ild Rohweder, Paulina Galazka, Pit Bukowski, Amanda Plummer
written by Anna de Paoli & Linus de Paoli
directed by Linus de Paoli

by Walter Chaw The storyline goes like this: Rey, the young woman in the new Star Wars trilogy, is a "Mary Sue"–a term used to describe a female character who is born fully-formed and, therefore, undeserving of her status as the hero of the story, any story. It's an argument made by mediocre men, usually mediocre white men, who have gathered together over social media to share their frustrations about how, essentially, their own worthiness has never been recognized by a world designed, now, to overlook and disdain them. It wasn't supposed to be this way. The parallel storyline is that women are usually murdered by men they know–ex-lovers or spurned would-be lovers–and that the best indicator for murderous gun violence is a history of domestic violence. We hold these truths now to be self-evident. And suddenly these mediocre men who used to get pushed into lockers and demeaned for their solitary interests are the masters of our culture, our industry, our government. There were warnings about this in films like The Last American Virgin and Revenge of the Nerds, remembering that the triumphant happy ending of the latter entailed one of the nerd heroes raping the girlfriend of the lead jock…and the girlfriend liking it a lot. Masculinity has always been this mash of the tragic and the toxic. It's irresolvable, though at least there can be better awareness.

FrightFest ’18: Incident in a Ghostland

August 29, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, France, FrightFest, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Ghostland
**½/****
starring Crystal Reed, Anastasia Phillips, Emilia Jones
written and directed by Pascal Laugier

by Walter Chaw Pascal Laugier, if he had made no other film than Martyrs, would still have made Martyrs: the cornerstone picture of the short-lived New French Extremity and one of the most startling (and nigh-unwatchable) films about faith ever made. It would be remarkable as the second half of a double-feature with Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc–maybe as part of a trilogy with Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Mad Mel’s Passion of the Christ would fit in there, too. Make a weekend of it with Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew–martyrdom and ecstasy and the cinematic arts. Laugier’s follow-up, The Tall Man, failed in comparison to Martyrs, as it must. He was briefly attached to a Hellraiser reboot with Clive Barker’s blessing (of course with Barker’s blessing: Martyrs is a film made by a Cenobite), but the franchise is cursed and it fell through. Folks have been waiting for Laugier to make another masterpiece. Incident in a Ghostland isn’t it, but like The Tall Man it’s a strong, technically-proficient genre exercise that deals in an interesting space with at-times striking images. Laugier is one of the only filmmakers who makes me queasy. His films aren’t kidding around.

FrightFest ’18: Lasso

August 26, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

***/****written by Roberto Marinasdirected by Evan Cecil by Walter Chaw Trish is the star of Lasso. Ostensibly a secondary character, she's played by trans activist Skyler Cooper (who identifies with masculine pronouns) with confidence, beauty, and strength. After the initial "is she a boy or a girl?" question asked by congenital screw-up Simon (Andrew Jacobs), Trish is just accepted as this embodiment of strength and empathy. When Simon beats himself up for causing the death of a few of his buddies, it's Trish who recognizes the importance of preserving his confidence for the long night ahead. She takes the lead.…

FrightFest ’18: Upgrade

August 25, 2018****/****, 2018, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

****/****
starring Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie
written and directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw I can't imagine I'll ever see a better Venom movie than Leigh Whannell's Upgrade, the story of a mild-mannered Luddite mechanic named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) who one day, after delivering a tricked-out antique ride to cyber-genius Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), is paralyzed in a terrible accident and forced to watch his girlfriend, tech-company functionary Asha (Melanie Vallejo), get assassinated by modded-out thugs led by psychopath Fisk (Benedict Hardie). In the film's near-future, there are limited Tetsuo: The Iron Man body modifications like guns embedded in gunsel's palms and enhanced limbs and vision alongside more common advances like self-driving cars and A.I. assistants. The tech, in other words, is entirely credible at first, as the film eases us into nanotechnology and an A.I., STEM (voiced by Simon Maiden), implanted in Grey to not just "cure" his paralysis but also, when allowed to operate independently, turn Grey into a one-man vengeance puppet. The first scene of STEM's emancipation is a glorious invention of fight choreography and performance philosophy: Grey is literally possessed, doesn't really "invest" in what his body's doing to other bodies, and, at the end of the sequence, begs with the last not-dismembered bad guy to please not get up off the floor. It's a Buster Keaton gag, really–the stone-faced centre of a violent storm. Marshall-Green's performance reminded me of both Steve Martin's in All of Me and Jeff Fahey's in Body Parts. In a year that saw another instalment in Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible series, this here is the year's best action scene.

FrightFest ’18: Summer of ’84

August 24, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Summer of 84
**½/****
starring Graham Verchere, Judah Lewis, Caleb Emery, Rich Sommer
written by Matt Leslie & Stephen J. Smith
directed by Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell & Yoann-Karl Whissell

by Walter Chaw From the first strains of Le Matos' Tangerine Dream-influenced score (borrowed most heavily from Risky Business, for some reason), even before the Class of 1984 title font tells it to you raw, you know that Summer of '84, from Turbo Kid helmers Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell (collectively known as RKSS), is going to be another '80s throwback flick. That's not bad in and of itself, but it comes with some built-in pitfalls. "Stranger Things", for instance, the setting is all it has going for it and it doesn't even get the vernacular right, whereas something like It well and truly knows the notes and hears the music, too. Summer of '84 falls somewhere between these two contemporary touchstones. It spends most of its time as a high-concept movie that rumbles along with cozy familiarity and an exceptional cast, and then in its last five minutes, it discovers its purpose and nails the landing. Pity that it didn't find its feet sooner. A greater pity, perhaps, that it didn't get another pass through the typewriter.

FrightFest ’18: Bad Samaritan

August 23, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Thriller

**½/****written by Brandon Boycedirected by Dean Devlin by Walter Chaw One-time Roland Emmerich beard Dean Devlin drops Bad Samaritan, a slick, old-school genre exercise in the mold of stuff like Bad Influence, Malice, and maybe a little of the Tom Holland Fright Night starring one of the Dr. Whos as a serial-killing millionaire scumbag. It's high camp, of course, played to the rafters by David Tennant as Cale, the murderer-cum-Richie Rich with not only a torture dungeon, but also a summer torture cabin to which he spirits poor Katie (Kerry Condon), who assures that she's cleaned herself using the proper…

The Ranger (2018)

August 18, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Chloe Levine, Granit Lahu, Jeremy Pope, Jeremy Holm
written by Jenn Wexler, Giaco Furino
directed by Jenn Wexler

by Walter Chaw Jenn Wexler's hyphenate debut is anchored by a tremendous performance from Chloe Levine–good enough that it peanut-butters over some of The Ranger's thematic gaps, its troubles with pacing and its identity crisis. The picture opens well, with a group of punks–of which Levine's Chelsea is a reluctant member–raising hell and eventually killing a cop. Chelsea takes her buddies to her uncle's cabin to hide. We're introduced to the cabin in the film's prologue as a stolid Ranger (Jeremy Holm) comforts young Chelsea (Jete Laurence) about something terrible while she nibbles on a sandwich. He compares her to a wolf, because she's "a fighter." Once removed from the urban environment, Chelsea finds her pals obnoxious: smoking inside, setting fires, painting trees, and generally being disrespectful of the woods in which she was raised. Her boyfriend, Garth (Granit Lahu), is especially the kind of lost youth who desperately deserves to get drop-kicked into a canyon.

Fantasia Festival ’18: Born of Woman (short films)

August 6, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Czech Republic, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Finland, Horror, Ireland, Norway, Sci-Fi, Short Films, South Korea, Thriller

by Walter Chaw This is what I believe: I believe that men and women are essentially different and that those differences result in perspectives that are necessarily different. I don't consciously privilege one perspective over the other, but I acknowledge that I am not always aware of my prejudices. I think Wonder Woman would have been garbage if a man had directed it; and I think 20th Century Women, written and directed by a man, had beautiful roles for women. It's confusing and it can be exhausting, but at the end of the day, creating an equal opportunity for women and people of colour to tell stories (whether they're theirs or not) can only be good. So…