A Yearning for Selfhood in Anup Singh’s ‘Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost’
“By grounding ‘Qissa’ in naturalism and avoiding melodramatic tropes, Singh creates a uniquely beguiling viewing experience.”
“By grounding ‘Qissa’ in naturalism and avoiding melodramatic tropes, Singh creates a uniquely beguiling viewing experience.”
“The 70s were a tumultuous and often bleak decade for the British film industry, and this pessimism bled into its output.”
“Ducournau’s approach to cinematic lineage and influence in ‘Titane’ is a complicated one, as she develops her singular filmmaking style into something even more evasive and intricate than in ‘Raw.'”
“‘Red State’ boasts a starry cast, but Smith’s story is ruthlessly contained, captured with a grainy texture, and presented like a true no-budget indie horror, with bursts of shocking violence punctuating the tense atmosphere.”
“Jack Curtis’ 1964 feature ‘The Flesh Eaters’ deserves consideration as a lost figurehead of the gore genre, and one of its more formative efforts.”
“Had ‘Censor’ managed both Enid’s personal nightmare and wrestled more deliberately with some of the moral questions posed by the title, more viewers might have been inclined to initiate conversations about the horror genre’s traditions of transgression.”
“Romero’s movies have a workshop feel to them, which elevates the horror to a startlingly realistic terror as if it was being documented live.”
“Sure, ‘Saint Maud’ can be called a horror film, but it is equally a psychological drama that gets a lot of mileage from a tried and true trope: the shifting power dynamics in a superior/subordinate relationship.”
“Roger Ebert once wrote ‘it’s not what a film is about, it’s how it is about it,’ and it’s this phrase that I usually return to when thinking about cinema that deals with humanity’s worst impulses.”
“Under its brutal dissembling of anthropocentrism and customary moral divides, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ points to the terror of a harsh and uncaring universe.”