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2 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby drew from the well of modern cringe comedies to tell its story of a pressure cooker of a shiva. That setting kept the film firmly grounded in a recognizable reality.
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2 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
One of the most famous Japanese ghost stories, Yotsuya Kaidan, or The Ghost of Yotsuya, saw two film adaptations in 1959 alone. The directors of those films, Nakagawa Nobuo and Misumi Kenji, respectively, used color to expressionistically convey the anger of the betrayed and murdered wife, Oiwa.
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2 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
For her 2023 filmmaking debut, Past Lives, Celine Song drew on her own experiences as an immigrant from Korea. While her follow-up film, Materialists, is less in conversation with specific personal ordeals than the rom-com genre as a whole, it shares with Past Lives a focus on how one’s love life can be complicated by fixations on past relationships—on both the roads not taken and those that may potentially open up to us in the future.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Set in 1994, 1978, and 1666, respectively, Leigh Janek’s Fear Street trilogy is, in many ways, a perfect encapsulation of the streaming era. The films’ period settings are little more than justifications for needle drops, while the costuming and set design are so broad in their presentation that the characters feel like modern teens dressed up in historical drag.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Set amid the wreckage of post-World War II Japan, Nakajima Sadao’s The Rapacious Jailbreaker locates the chaos and instability of the era almost entirely within the wild journey of its ruthless, tenacious protagonist, Ueda Masayuki (Matsukata Hiroki).
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) doesn’t bother asking for acceptance or respect from white people. He unequivocally demands it. Unlike Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night is under no delusions that racial prejudice can be corrected merely by white people coming into proximity with intelligent, successful people of color, particularly in a small town like Sparta, Mississippi.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
In the first half of Girl with a Suitcase, 16-year-old Lorenzo (Jacques Perrin) looks after the showgirl, Aida (Claudia Cardinale), whom his older brother, Marcello (Corrado Pani), promised to help before cruelly and casually ditching her during a road trip.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Gavin O’Connor’s 2016 film The Accountant is by and large memorable for the pairing of Ben Affleck’s autistic accountant-slash-assassin Christian Wolff and Anna Kendrick’s exuberant number cruncher Dana. Their rapport is charming, with Christian’s innate bluntness amusingly clashing with Dana’s anxious people-pleasing instincts.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Each of the films collected in Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau emphasize the possibilities and discrepancies between reality as it is and as the protagonists see it or want it to be. Like so many leads in noirs and neo-noirs alike, these men are plagued by big, unattainable dreams and are left grasping at any hope or freedom they can find, only to be inevitably confronted by the harsh truth that everything good is fleeting.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
For a spell, François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming plays like the type of low-key drama that aims more to comfort viewers than challenge them. Set primarily in a small village in the French countryside, the film treats us to plenty of pretty, bucolic shots of its elderly protagonist, Michelle (Hélène Vincent), going for walks in the woods with her best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), picking mushrooms, and preparing meals.
