College isn’t going as planned in Shithouse, the feature debut of writer/director Cooper Raiff. A lot of expectations are placed on your college years. Wild nights, lifelong friends, the chance to do things you’ll never do again, all of that and more is supposed to be yours, but Alex isn’t getting any of it. His freshman…
Welcome to Filmographies, a biweekly column for completists. Every edition brings a working actor’s resumé into focus as we learn about what makes them so compelling. In this entry, we spotlight the film and TV work of Zoë Kravitz. The inimitable Zoë Kravitz has long been touted as a rising star. Considering her various contributions to…
Welcome to 4:3 & Forgotten — a weekly column in which Kieran Fisher and I get to look back at TV terrors that scared adults (and the kids they let watch) across the limited airwaves of the ’70s. This week we head to a small town with a spider problem in Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo! Steven Spielberg’s Jaws…
Bollywood Inquiry is a monthly column on the biggest new Bollywood movies. Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl (Sharan Sharma) The young, starry-eyed Gunjan Saxena (Jahnvi Kapoor) has her adult life all figured out. She’s smart, clued into the world, and has all the passion and persistence needed to achieve her dream of becoming a combat pilot for…
Bleed with Me, the first feature from writer/director Amelia Moses, remains one of the standouts from this year’s virtual Fantasia Film Festival. Set in an isolated cabin, the film follows a young woman who becomes increasingly aware of her precarious surroundings, and her odd relationship with her best friend. At a snappy 79 minutes, Bleed…
In HBO’s immersive and deeply moving coming-of-age drama We Are Who We Are, everyone is either finding their own identity or reclaiming something that was once lost about them. Created, directed, and co-written by the acclaimed director of Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino, the show focuses on a group of teenagers, as well…
“People will know that you can’t just smuggle in, hunker down, and wait to be legalised”. Trump’s blatantly racist remarks play on the background while Olivia (Isabel Sandoval) quietly eats her breakfast. She faces the living, tired map of many concerns severely amplified by the shouting man. Trump’s words come back to hunt Olivia throughout…
“You don’t like apples?” “I don’t remember if I like them” Read moreA Guide to The Perfect Bong Joon-ho MarathonEchoing the philosophical wonderings of Saramago, dwelling on the complex themes explored by Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and wrapping it all with the unnerving narrative style of Yorgos Lanthimos, Apples is a gritty,…
Horror films have the unique ability of finding terror in even the most comforting of places. Homes, lovers, friendships, and even inanimate objects can become enemies of the night, lurking in the shadows, concealing their true intentions until it’s too late. With Rent-A-Pal, director Jon Stevenson becomes the latest director to turn the tables on the…
Estus Washington Pirkle was a Baptist preacher out of Mississippi and evangelist of the “turn or burn” variety that prized quantity of conversions over the quality of conversions. He was far from the only evangelist to hold the same approach to bringing souls to the kingdom of the Christian God, however, he may the only…
While survival and transitional stories are far from a new tale, their ability to interweave important topics and necessary conversations of the world into the narrative is what keeps them fresh and relevant. It is their ability to stay true to the issues through strong characters and solid setting that maintains their importance throughout the…
Podcasts, puppets, and more are on the menu for the month of September. Goes to show you when there are no limits to creativity when it comes to fundraising through our friends at Seed&Spark! WORKPLACE COMEDY PODCAST Workplace Comedy Podcast (2020) – source: Emmy Laybourne A lot of podcasts are fans yammering about their nerdy…
Xavier Dolan‘s films are often loud, charged with audacious youthfulness and dominated by characters with strong personalities and a tendency for hostility. Sometimes it works, especially when Dolan finds a way to balance the strident feelings exuded from his script with moments of tenderness. But for some other times, it feels like Dolan is more…
It’s hard to not think about our current situation — the pandemic, the lockdown, the self-isolation, etc — while watching Cho Il-hyung‘s zombie thriller #Alive. Granted, Cho, in his directorial debut, takes the somewhat generic formula of zombie apocalypse movies to tell an incredibly resonant story about what loneliness can do to people in a…
To say Brian De Palma is a master of obsession is an understatement. For more than fifty years, he’s demonstrated his skill as one of the best American filmmakers by creating works steeped in paranoia and abound with suspenseful sequences that would have made Hitchcock sweat. His films, while often revolving around characters driven by…
It’s never too late to reinvent yourself in The Forty-Year-Old Version, the feature debut of writer, director, and actor Radha Blank. Drawing from her own life, Radha envisions a woman not dissimilar to herself: a promising playwright who, after being put on a prestigious 30 Under 30 list, saw her career fizzle. Now teaching and approaching 40, she’s…
After a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last January, Dinner in America, a punk comedy-drama writer/director Adam Rehmeier, came to genre-focused audiences at the virtual version of the Fantasia Film Festival. Film Inquiry chatted with Rehmeier about Mac Demarco, a good mixtape, and finding the right lead actors. This interview has been edited for…
It’s been a weird year, and my experience with 2020’s digital Sheffield Doc/Fest has been unusual. My engagement with the material has been somewhat at an arm’s length, without the opportunity for live participation and networking sessions. Nevertheless, the festival team did a remarkable job of consistently holding virtual Q&A sessions and panels on key…
Emma Jensen’s screenplay spares no time in setting the rules of I Am Woman, directed by Unjoo Moon. Free of the childhood, teenage, and first broken relationship, the film directly begins with Helen Reddy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) walking through a subway holding her 3-year old daughter, Tracy. Dressed in rosewood, a feminal color, while most men…
Acting is an art form, and behind every iconic character is an artist expressing themselves. Welcome to The Great Performances, a bi-weekly column exploring the art behind some of film and television’s greatest characters. This time, we turn the spotlight on Jennifer Carpenter as the titular character in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. When someone…
A woman will really get in your head in Possessor, the latest from writer/director Brandon Cronenberg. She’s able to do that because she’s backed by a powerful company, one that’s invested in mind control technology that allows Tasya to take control of another person. Through these unfortunate souls she carries out lucrative hits with hardly…