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,…
35 Shots of Rum (Denis, 2008) is a bit of a departure, both for Claire Denis and for me. It is still as incisive and poetic as her other work, but she has replaced the usual turbulent heart of her cinema with a tranquil one. Being a loving homage to…
How far are you willing to go? In George Sluizer’s The Vanishing (1988), Rex makes the ultimate choice to follow the trail of the disappeared Saskia until the eternal uncertainty of her fate can be resolved. Few endings in modern memory can match that resolution. Skip the dumbed down (and…