Leah Schnelbach

2 weeks ago | reactormag.com | Leah Schnelbach

All You Need Is Death opens on a scene we’ve seen a thousand times before: a man is being interviewed about a dead girl. We watch his testimony through the lens of a video camera, we see the grainy footage of people in a bar—the kind of footage that often becomes a de facto Last Known Photograph. Then we cut back to the night in question, months earlier, and fall into an entirely different story, one of ancient songs, unbreakable curses, and tortured loves.

2 weeks ago | reactormag.com | Leah Schnelbach

You can’t spend a decade building John Wick up as this mythological killer and then give us a small woman who can magically do all the same stuff as him. And Ballerina… doesn’t do that. Eve Macarro messes up a lot. Her work is difficult, it takes effort, and she fails—often—along the way, but she always gets back up and stabs again. And unsurprisingly Ana de Armas is fantastic as Eve.

3 weeks ago | reactormag.com | Leah Schnelbach

A number of years ago—I, hilariously, can’t remember precisely when—I had a dream in which the people I was dreaming about realized that they were dreams, that they only existed in my mind, and that when I woke up, they’d wink out. This sent them in to a screaming panic. I tried so hard not to wake up. Does the fact that I remember them, not as individuals but as that screaming mob, mean they still exist? Do they only exist in that state of panic?

3 weeks ago | reactormag.com | Leah Schnelbach

Bring Her Back knows what it’s doing. It’s well-made, brilliantly acted, dark and startling and brutal. And if you saw Danny and Michael Philippou’s directorial debut, Talk to Me, which Danny Philippou co-wrote with Bill Hinzman, you’ll know that the trio have a rare talent for exploring grief through relentless horror. Bring Her Back makes Talk to Me look like an episode of Bluey, and I’m not really sure it was for me.  Parts of it were.

1 month ago | reactormag.com | Alex Brown |Leah Schnelbach |Liz Bourke

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