By: Jolie Featherstone From Hereditary to Midsommar, and now Beau Is Afraid, director Ari Aster has dug deeper and deeper into the primal fears and anxieties of the human psyche, while injecting seemingly personal vulnerability into his doomed protagonists’ journeys.
By: Jolie Featherstone With C’mon C’mon, writer/director Mike Mills (Beginners, 20th Century Women) continues to examine and affirm the vulnerable chambers of the heart and psyche that we so often fiercely guard from revealing to others. Reflective and poignant, his films are companions for the parts of us that we struggle to accept, particularly when it comes to reconciling individual experiences within the context of family.
By: Addison Wylie “Bittersweet” is the best word to describe Her. Spike Jonze has taken our bad habits with technology and projected them to frame an original love story with messages of poignancy. It’s a personal film about an impersonal society. The characters on-screen are closed off to everyone around them. Among them is writer Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix who is a spitting image of Napoleon Dynamite’s “womanizing” brother Kip). People are enjoyably…
By: Addison Wylie The power of suggestion is afoot in The Master. Not just in the film itself, but it surrounded the film’s promotion and lead-up to its theatrical release. With the mention of a cult and a leader confidently guiding followers through his “rational thinking and cleansing”, many linked Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest to Scientology and to L. Ron Hubbard, the creator of the infamous religion. It struck controversy around the film and the…