Review: Guatemala's Oscar submission "La Llorona"

by Nick Taylor

Three cheers for the Boston Society of Film Critics, who kicked off this year’s wave of critics prizes with an amazingly idiosyncratic list of winners and runners-up. Capping their day off with their Foreign Language Film category, they honored Jayro Bustamente’s political ghost story La Llorona, with The Painted Bird in second place. La Llorona has been selected as Guatemala’s submission for International Film at the Oscars, making this the second of Bustamente’s films to be submitted after his astonishing debut Ixcanul in 2015. Three more cheers for Cláudio Alves, whose heroically long FYC thread on Twitter has informed a lot of my recent choices for which 2020 films to catch up with.

La Llorona’s opening credits are delivered over a black background with white text, while a woman’s quiet, hurried, forceful prayers can be heard. Our first real image of the film is a close-up on the speaker’s face, revealed to be an older white woman (Margarita Kenéfic), back straight and eyes unwavering as she stares directly into the lens and asks for protection for herself and her family against those who seek them harm...

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BIFA Nominations: "Saint Maud" leads the horror friendly pack

by Nathaniel R

The British Independent Film Awards have announced their nominations for the year. 27 films received at least one nomination but the bulk of the nominations went to Saint Maud (17), His House (16), and Rocks (15). UPDATE: Rocks and His House later emerged as the big winners. Higher profile Oscar hopefuls like The Father (6) and Ammonite (2) didn't do as well though The Father eventually won 3 of its 6 categories. Due to the category divisions BIFA has a lot of people that are double or triple nominated this year (they have the regular categories plus "debut" style categories). The BIFAs have a unique process in that the nominations are juried and then winners are decided in two separate ways. All BIFA vote by secret ballot to decide the winners of the nine craft categories plus Best Film, Best International Film, Discovery Award, and Short Film. But everything else is decided by discussion of individual juries separate from the juries who picked the nomination! Confusing right?! 

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH THE WINNERS 02/19/21

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Horror Actressing: Natalie Portman in "Black Swan"

by Jason Adams

We're in between seasons of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series, taking the post-Halloween holidays off, but I decided to spring out from under my self-appointed mothballs to celebrate this week's 10th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky's le grande trash Black Swan -- to spring out, to do a lustily precise pirouette, and to plunk down some love here for Natalie Portman's spectacular and much-deserved Oscar-winning turn as the prima ballerina Nina Sayers, our favorite sweet girl slash toe-crunching psycho.

Over this past weekend I randomly ended up re-watching two seemingly disparate horror films that you might not immediately sense a sister-bond between... 

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Showbiz History: Swanson, John & Yoko, and Freddie Krueger

6 random things that happened on this day, November 9th, in showbiz history...

1931 Diva movie star Gloria Swanson divorces aristocrat Henri de la Falaise and marries Michael Farmer on the same day! (She and Farmer had married three months prior only to realize her divorce hadn't been final... so they had to to it again by which time she was four months pregnant) She was 33 years old and it was her fourth (of six) marriages.

1939 "Garbo Laughs!" Ninotchka has its world premiere in NYC...

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Horror Costuming: Bram Stoker's Dracula

by Cláudio Alves

For the past few weeks, I've been exploring the greatness of costume design in the realm of horror cinema. None of the movies we discussed, not even those somewhat embraced in the awards circuit, got many golden laurels for their feats of costuming. That's, unfortunately, what usually happens to cinematic excellence that happens to manifest outside the boundaries of prestige drama. However, there are always a few exceptions that prove the rule. Such is the case of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. The picture won three Academy Awards, including the prize for Best Costume Design.

The creations of the late Eiko Ishioka are some of the weirdest and most spellbinding costumes ever made for cinema and, as far as I'm concerned, she's the greatest recipient of my favorite Oscar. Michael has recently explored his first foray into the dark marvels of Dracula, and Jason has previously explored Eiko's Oscar win. Nonetheless, I couldn't let Halloween go by without revisiting this most wondrous of big-screen wardrobes. Join me on this deep dive into the nightmarish fantasy of Eiko Ishioka's Dracula…

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