“Within the context of a cinema that is high-strung and often defined by its over-the-top, spectacle-driven family dramas, ‘Ribbon’ and its smallness (and everydayness) is not just a refreshing break but an extremely well-timed breaking of the mold.”
“Renzu’s film gives a face to the thousands of women featured in the papers, disturbingly called ‘half widows’ — not just defined by the lack of a husband, but also by this ‘half,’ not full, not a complete status of being.”
“Although individual grief may be colored by guilt or loneliness, jealousy or the passage of time, ultimately everyone who knows love will know a ghost story, and suffer the same grief or become a ghost in the end.”
“‘Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror On Film And Television’ provides insights not only on genre cinema, but on origins and aspects of the holiday season itself.”
“If Murphy’s Law were to be made into a film, it’d look a lot like Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s ‘Long Live Brij Mohan!’ His production, in more ways than one, is also a metaphor for the city of Delhi.”
In the Vague Visages Writers’ Room on Facebook, freelancers were asked to comment about their favorite under the radar films of 2017. Enjoy!
“The Hollywood dream lives on proudly in ‘The Disaster Artist.’”
“‘Village Rockstars’ represents a cultural category that is largely ignored by mainstream cinema and heralds a new chapter in the contemporary practice of serious filmmaking in India.”
“McDonagh’s film is as much of a message movie as summiting Mount Kilimanjaro is a relaxing family-friendly vacation.”
“A dance of layered visuals and eye-popping patterns, ‘Coco’ is well balanced with the understated”
“Achieving a vibrant mix of swooning sincerity and bitter irony, Feng Xiaogang’s ‘Youth’ walks the tightrope of Chinese history with a showman’s flair and a subversive wit, channelling its conflicting perceptions of the past into a single cohesive, ultimately jaded vision.”
“Martel’s film is an absolute masterpiece in visual symbolism and deserves to be seen on that basis alone.”
“It’s an odd little film, more melancholy and plaintive than outright scary or troubling, that slowly crawls under your skin.”
“Painfully ironic, aggressive and humorously on point, Östlund’s films are timely cinematic pieces that put their characters’ moral compasses at stake.”
“In ‘Crash,’ sex feels like a traffic accident. In ‘Videodrome,’ it becomes the subject of a warped, projected fantasy.”
“He always took the horror genre seriously, and that often meant daring to laugh in the face of the darkest horrors, toeing the line between irony and total seriousness.”
Tanner Tafelski Interviews Theodore Collatos
‘Darkest Hours,’ Genre and Writing: A.M. Stanley Interviews Mike Thorn
“Observing the dangerous consequences of retreating too far into escapist entertainment, these two films suggest that beneath all this cultural noise is the unacknowledged truth that the most fervent of music nerds and fanboys may indeed be ‘scared as shit.’”
“In ‘Human Desire,’ the train tracks carry its hero into the sunny paradise of the American Dream, not the depths of noir’s endless night.”