Halloween Treats: "Red Rooms" is the year's best scare

by Nick Taylor

As you may remember from last week, I made a threat and promise to talk about contemporary horror this October. We’ve arrived. Hands down the best horror film I’ve seen from this year is the Canadian thriller Red Rooms, a 2023 release by Pascal Plante that’s just completed a months-long journey across festivals and art house cinemas before arriving in your hard drives through a menacing mp4 file. It’s a nasty, skin-crawling film, diving into the world of true crime prurience and online torture porn through the vantage of one of the year’s most intimidating performances. Wanna know more? Follow me under the cut...

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AFI Fest: Emotional Outbursts in “A Real Pain” and “Nightbitch”

by Eurocheese

Festering emotions were front-and-center in these two strong films at the festival, though they were expressed in very different ways. Both screenplays played with tone, though Nightbitch’s swings didn’t always land as successfully as A Real Pain's. In each film, one charismatic performance will be the top takeaway for most viewers..

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Don't miss out on Dupieux's "Daaaaaalí!"

by Cláudio Alves

Earlier this year, for the Cannes at Home opener, I explored the filmography of one Quentin Dupieux, from his earliest shorts to the stage-bound satire of Yannick. At the time, only two of the French director's films were excluded from consideration since, sadly, they were unavailable. The Second Act marked the start of festivities at the Croisette while Daaaaaalí! was still making the rounds in more minor festivals before international distribution. Well, some months have passed, and the latter flick has enjoyed a limited run in American theaters and is now coming to VOD. It's as good an opportunity as any to reflect on its idiosyncratic director. And trust that if you're a Dupieux devotee, you won't want to miss Daaaaaalí!...

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NYFF '24: "Suburban Fury" tells the tall tale of a wannabee Presidential Assassin

by Cláudio Alves

On September 22nd, 1975, just seventeen days after Squeaky Fromme had attempted the same, Sara Jane Moore fired at President Gerald Ford. Neither of the 45-year-old woman's shots hit their target, though she came dangerously close. Had Moore noticed the sight on her revolver was 6 inches misplaced, she might have done it. Such violent actions came less than two years after this housewife from the San Francisco suburbs had been recruited by the FBI as an informant, going into militant groups and becoming radicalized in the process. Her thwarted presidential assassination led to much media hullabaloo, pithy dismissals of Moore as being "off her mind," and a life sentence, of which she served 32 years.

Nearly half a century after the shooting, director Robinson Devor puts her at the center of Suburban Fury, a new documentary where the would-be assassin is given ample opportunity to tell her own story…

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NYFF '24: “The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire” sings an unusual song

by Nick Taylor

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire presents the most concrete details about Suzanne Césaire's life - perhaps the only concrete details about her life - in its opening title cards. Born in 1915 in Martinique, Césaire was a poet and essayist who began publishing her essays in 1941. Her work was heavily influenced by feminism, communism, and anti-colonial theory, and she achieved a degree of sociocultural prominence before 1946 when she vanished from the literary circles she'd held so dear. One character, an actress playing Césaire in a film about her life, wisely notes, "We're making a movie about a woman who didn't want to be known." And this sentiment informs this thesis in a nutshell. To compensate, director Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich has nestled her work in a metafictional story around a largely fictionalized treatise on Césaire. It's a strange proposition, but is it an effective one? Let's talk about it...

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