Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) belongs to a special category of films in my personal canon. Sometimes a movie hits you like a bolt out of the blue and you know it is going to be a permanent fixture on your list of favorite films of all time. The…
It’s May again! And you know what that means around these parts – film noir. We are in our second year of the Noir City festival postponement in Austin due to COVID, but we are soldiering on with some of our favorite titles that fall under the broad heading of…
Jennifer Kent, the writer and director of The Babadook (2014), crafted the story of an exhausted widowed mother and her demanding 6 year-old into a psychological horror film about facing up to the darkness within ourselves. Those of you who are parents, and even those of us who are not,…
Every time I watch Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, 1971), I just want it to be over. Then I want to watch it again. It is just as terrifying each time, and I am just as much a prisoner to its landscape as John, played here by Gary Bond. I know…
The first time I saw Jonathan auf der Heide’s Van Diemen’s Land (2009), it knocked me back in my seat. My head was already swirling that day seven years ago from everything else that Fantastic Fest had jammed into it. When you are trying to take in all that one…