Horror Actressing: Rebecca Ferguson in "Doctor Sleep"

by Jason Adams

(As the year marches towards its conclusion we're using our weekly "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to take a look at the best of what the genre's given us in the past 12 months, actress-wise. Here's our latest fave 0f 2019.) It's an exciting time to watch Rebecca Ferguson on-screen -- you still get the feeling of discovery every time she shows up, like we haven't got an inkling still of what she's capable of tapping into. She's reminding me of Andrea Riseborough in that way...

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How had I never seen... "Rear Window"?

by Chris Feil

Rear Window has to be one of the more embarrassing blind spots to have among the entirety of Alfred Hitchcock’s repertoire or as a Jimmy Stewart lover, but alas I had it. I know, I know.

Maybe the best thing I can chalk it up to is something that’s been in the ether of my lifelong Hitchcock consumption that’s kept me from the Happy Ending Hitchcocks. Things like To Catch A Thief stayed out of my orbit until adulthood without the veneer of morbidity to entice them to a young horrorhound. And rest assured that Rear Window ends as quaintly, if subversively sly, as any of his films. But like me telling myself I’ll eventually catch up to the film, Rear Window is itself about things we put off and avoid. It’s a movie about a man trying so hard to avoid commitment that he gets himself invested in a murder.

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"The Irishman" isn't "The Irishman"

by Cláudio Alves

Martin Scorsese's latest magnum opus is an epic in most senses of the word. It's one of the master's most dense exercises, using biography as a vehicle to explore the great social transformations of post-war American Society. The Irishman is a portrait of Death as an ever-encroaching certainty, a treatise on the painful passage of time and a theatre of memory where the spiritedness of youth is curdled by the self-image of the old men who revisit it. 

That's heavy stuff but here's something lighter: As the film's very credits show, this gargantuan feat of cinema isn't called The Irishman at all…

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BIFA crowns Renée and "For Sama" makes history!

by Cláudio Alves

Renée's coming for that Oscar.The nitty-gritty of awards season is upon us. The same names and films are bound to be repeated over and over again until the high holy night of the Oscars. Thankfully, not all awards organizations follow the party line when it comes to rewarding cinematic excellence. In other words, not everyone wants to predict the Oscars. Some still have originality, a sense of variety and the desire to shine a light on films far from the Academy’s radar. Such is the case of the British Independent Film Awards, which were given out today in London.

However, as you can see by this piece's title, it’s not all out of left-field choices. Renée Zellweger just won her first big award for Judy and many more are sure to come. Even so, the biggest winner of the night is the sort of film that (as much as it saddens us) will probably never come close to a Best Picture Oscar. We’re talking about a foreign-language documentary directed by a woman…

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Animated Feature Contenders: China's "White Snake"

by Tim

The original Chinese title for the new animated mythological epic White Snake is just a hair different from the one that distributor GKIDS is using to promote the film. The literal translation is White Snake: Origin, which tells us quite a lot, in fact. This isn't just any old fantasy adventure, you see: it is, in fact, an original prequel to one of the most important of all traditional Chinese folk tales, "Legend of the White Snake." This matters for a couple of reasons: first, because it explains something that a lot of American critics have been complaining about, which is the film's frequently inscrutable narrative progression. Which is, to be fair, a little bit inscrutable, but much less so if you keep in mind that, for the target audience, many of the things that seem most inexplicable have already been explained simply by the film announcing up front that it takes place in a certain kind of generic universe where certain rules apply. Which sucks if you're not part of that target audience, but we can at least try to meet the film where it lives.

Second, even if you (like me) don't know much or anything about "Legend of the White Snake," you probably at least know one or two folk tales from your own background culture, and wherever you come from in the world, folklore has a very distinct cadence...

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