Marshall Shaffer

6 days ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

As horror has solidified itself as one of the last remaining bankable bastions of cinema, Stephen King’s vast trove of writing has become a juggernaut of intellectual property. The author is to the genre what Marvel is to action. And few filmmakers understand the literary giant’s enduring appeal better than Mike Flanagan, who previously brought King’s Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep to the screen.

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

“Watching [Wes Anderson] discover and use Michael [Cera] was like watching God discovering water,” quipped Benedict Cumberbatch at the Cannes Film Festival press conference for The Phoenician Scheme last week. “It seems like a pretty obvious, natural element to have in his arsenal as a filmmaker.” And Cumberbatch is right, as it does feel long overdue for Cera to join one of Anderson’s ensembles.

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

For a film ripped from the headlines of global politics, the most intriguing glimpses of reality in Ghost Trail ironically come from inside a video game. In several scenes that unfold within a war-themed first-person shooter, members of a secret European cell plot to find the Syrian war criminals who brutalized them in their home country.

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

In Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, an inclination toward pondering the divine goes hand-in-hand with the nearness of demise. The filmmaker arrives at this junction not because, as Christopher Hitchens might say, death causes religion. It’s through the sharpening of focus around what matters in life when its end feels imminent for Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro), an international businessman who survives another assassination attempt by plane crash at the film’s outset.

3 weeks ago | theplaylist.net | Marshall Shaffer

Throughout “Bring Her Back,” foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins) provides something like an impromptu version of descriptive audio to her nearsighted teenage ward Piper (Sora Wong). For a film devoted to rendering vision impairment with dignity by casting a young actress with the condition, these moments are a powerful nod to the importance of accessibility. They’re also a neat metaphor for a film that never transcends its own neat metaphor.