RECOMMENDED

Deliciously idiosyncratic and genially creepy, Peter Strickland’s “Berberian Sound Studio” is a tart treat for the ear and the eye. In 1976 Italy, sound designer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) is summoned to the dank and dismal chambers of a rundown studio to provide the sound effects for a horror exploitationer called “The Equestrian Vortex.” On one page, this rude, taut tone poem is an aural nightmare in the vein of the metacinematic play of Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom” or Brian DePalma’s “Blow Out”; on another it’s a cheekily disgusting catalog of squish and splorps and splats and screams and shrieks and tremolo and falsetto and rip and slash. Steeped in atmosphere, “Berberian Sound Studio” manages to be an experimental film, a chamber drama, and a neat psychological horror in its own right. Read the rest of this entry »

As tens and tens of millions of dollars worth of family therapy and nepotistic eyewash, the Jaden Smith-solo-act-family-adventure “After Earth” sounded bleak from the get-go. Don’t care. Won’t care. Can’t care. Those forebodings briefly dissipated as the lights went down, but quickly, director M. Night Shyamalan did not fail to disappoint even with the lowest of expectations. Co-written by Shyamalan (“The Happening”) from a story credited to Will Smith, its faults include having its characters speak at all, alternating pseudo-technical doublespeak with affirmations about vanquishing damaging past memories from your soul. “Danger is real. Fear is a choice.” Who’s being indoctrinated here? Is this a teachable moment being offered up? A thousand years after humanity abandons Earth for “Nova Prime,” Jaden Smith plays Kitai Raige, scion of “Prime Commander General Cypher Raige of the United Ranger Corps,” embodied by his father, Will Smith, and his modest yet bustling thirty-first-century soul patch. Read the rest of this entry »

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The title “Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal” sounds as Canadian as all-get-out, and sure, enough it is. Well, it’s a Danish co-production, but still: Boris Rodriguez’s droll horror-comedy posits an ever-more-fucked-up-than-most flesh-eater as a stifled painter’s muse. (It’s good to know there are more ways out of creative block yet to be divined.) The deadpan and pacing share that usual eerie, near-airless Canadian tempo, and while the ideas could have gone toward Peter Jackson’s earliest splatter-coms like “Braindead,” there’s a genially bent tone that gratifying snuggles nearer the Coens. Plus, a fresh way of satirizing the art world is always welcome. Read the rest of this entry »

Filthy muck, cranberry-to-crimson spray and gush and relentless, unyielding torture of its characters are the hallmarks of Uruguayan debut feature director Fede Alvarez’s hostile, on-the-nose, off-the-mark charnel-house remake of Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead,” which rests in memory more as a series of sustained takes with intermittent loopy humor than a hell-house of would-be entertainment. Splinted, splayed, battered, nail-gunned, burnt, shredded, raped bodies shift in clean geometry across a palette the deep dun-red-brown of aged parchment, with a clinical fixation on incidental vivisection. But, still, c’mon, how could you mistake the intention of a movie when it’s clearly announced in the teaser opening scene, which includes the lines, “I will rip your soul out, Daddy, motherfucker, fuck, fuck, fuck!” (Well, yes, true, Daddy cannot ever be less than a motherfucker.) Or in the deep, spiny woods do you really want to tear wads of wrapping off a book fastened with coils of industrial strength barbed wire and bound in harshly stitched human skin and read scrawled red incantations aloud? Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

“Everybody’s miserable here, they just see the same things, it’s sad.”

One of four female characters in Harmony Korine’s “Spring Breakers,” says that of her disillusion in the middle of a long, loud, bright, violent, neon-and-fluorescent-colored Florida spring break weekend, but it could also apply to some of the amusingly disparate and volatile reactions from its opening press, especially in the past week since its debut at the SXSW festival in Austin.

Four college girls—Brit (Ashley Benson), Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens) and Cotty (Rachel Korine)—have little on their mind—seemingly—except going to spring break somewhere along the Florida coast, but they’re broke. So, balaclava-hooded, the four hold up a restaurant for the cash they need. Once in the Promised Land, they wind up in jail, where they’re inexplicably bailed out by Alien (James Franco), a willful self-caricature of a white-wanting-to-be-black pimp who is deeply, darkly conflicted about himself and the world, or the cartoon, he lives in. More guns and more disillusionment ensue, with Britney Spears’ musical numbers and a loping, warping score by Skrillex and Cliff Martinez (“Drive” and many Steven Soderbergh movies). Korine’s gotten more and more artful over the years at describing/disemboweling his wanton provocations, usually obscuring intention for sensation: “I never cared so much about making perfect sense; I wanted to make perfect nonsense,” is one of his calling-card quotes about “Breakers.” Read the rest of this entry »

The American debut of kind-to-be-cruel South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (“Old Boy,” “Lady Vengeance”), based on a script by the actor Wentworth Miller (“Prison Break”) with rewrites by Erin Cressida Wilson (“Secretary”) is a brisk, chilly variation on themes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” but it never finds a convincing shape of its own. “Stoker,” opens on the day of a funeral for eighteen-year-old India Stoker’s beloved father, who taught her all she knows about how and what to shoot, but not all of family history, which gets rewritten with the arrival of Uncle Charles. Uncle Charlie is played by Matthew Goode as the kind of madman who should be revealed not as increasingly mad, or merely misunderstood, but an actor instructing some kind of second-rate acting school in how to be a bad actor. As young India (rather than “Shadow of a Doubt”‘s young Charlie/Charlotte) blonde Mia Wasikowska’s genuine screen presence is damped by shoulder-length black hair that suggests both hanging moss and scary girl children in J-horror movies. Goode is bad. As India’s impassive, doll-like mother, Nicole Kidman makes a fine Stepford widow. The setting is generic economy gothic, verdant by day and currant-pooled by night. Stuff happens, then some more stuff happens. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In the recent cinema of sweethearts, that girl next door is not dating a guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Class conflict– and the color line–are, like, so twentieth century. Loving the Other means someone or something else these days. The daughter of the police chief eyed a werewolf and a vampire in “Twilight.” In the upcoming “Beautiful Creatures,” a high-school boy will fall for a witch. And in “Warm Bodies,” Julie (Teresa Palmer), the daughter of a general, gets sweet on a zombie, “a sensitive undead slacker,” as the press notes aptly profile R. (Nicholas Hoult, “About a Boy,” “A Single Man”). R. can only remember the first letter of his name. Wearing a crimson hoodie, he stumbles around an airport populated with other zombies. His nimble mind rambles with an interior monologue: “What am I doing with my life… Why can’t I connect with people?” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Glum Irish micro-terror, “Citadel” is a clammy accomplishment in primal fear by first-time director Ciaran Foy. In “Edenstown,” a wintry world of battered apartment blocks (shot in Glasgow), a single-father Irish agoraphobic (Aneurin Barnard) must battle a feral gang endangering his infant daughter. The results, inside many confined spaces and often in dark beyond dark, are taut, tough and troubling and hardly for the soft of heart. Foy’s immediately deserving of a wider canvas for his substantial formal skills. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A raft of semi-comprehensible tumult in satirical drag, Victor Ginzburg’s frenetic adaptation of Viktor Pelevin’s novel “Generation P” spends itself in gonzo aspiration and colorful pre-millennial proto-anti-capitalist mayhem. It has a matter-of-fact baroque that suggests an image of novelist-present-tense-futurist William Gibson sitting in Vancouver, smiling, even if unaware of the film’s existence. Set in Moscow in the 1990s at the rise of a new Russia after the end of the Cold War and the USSR, poet Babylen Tatarsky is inducted into copywriting as well as a mysterious group known as the Cult of Ishtar. Those sympathetic may find a touch of lysergic screwball, a report on a gangsterism of ideas: other viewers may simply see it as unhinged disorder. (I like it.) Read the rest of this entry »