Marshall Shaffer

New York

Freelance Writer at Freelance

☀️: Associate media director 🌘: Freelance writer (frequently seen on: @slant_magazine, @decider, @theplaylistnews, @crookedmarquee). We'll get along.

Articles

Andrew Ahn on 'The Wedding Banquet' and Queering Tradition

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

When filmmaker Andrew Ahn was eight, his mother rented Ang Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet from a video store owing to its status as an Asian film that white people were interested in. Unbeknownst to them, the titular wedding is but a front for a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant to get his green card and remain in America. The moment, something akin to an origin story, was also an awakening for a filmmaker who’d take particular interest in depicting the gay Asian-American experience on screen.
David Cronenberg on Channeling Grief Into 'The Shrouds'

1 week ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

“I’ve been coming to New York since the 1940s,” David Cronenberg reminisced when introducing The Shrouds at the New York Film Festival last fall. “Yes,” he quipped, “that means I’m the exact same age as Joe Biden.” Unlike the 46th president, however, the pioneer of body horror is showing no signs of losing a step. Following the longest hiatus of his half-century career, Cronenberg has emerged with a mournful and masterful one-two punch in the 2020s.
Zombie-ie-ie-ie

1 week ago | marshallandthemovies.substack.com | Marshall Shaffer

This is a movie newsletter, after all, but here I am for the second post in a row talking about a tie-in with television. I guess enough of you nagging me that I don’t keep up with popular shows finally got to me! So I’ve started watching HBO’s The Last of Us ahead of its season two premiere on Sunday, although I’m not going to be caught up in time to watch.
A Spooky Tale of Teenage Angst

3 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

The deep genre roots of Laura Casabé’s The Virgin of the Quarry Lake, adapted by Benjamin Naishtat from a series of horror stories by acclaimed Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez, might not be immediately apparent. But well before Casabé delivers on the promise teased by some ominous mystical tropes, the story already feels more fraught and frightening than your typical coming-of-age drama. The way the film sees it, there’s no terror quite like a teenage girl with no outlet for her emotions.
‘Drowning Dry’ Review: Two Lithuanian Families, One Grisly Multiverse of Sadness

3 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

Writer-director Laurynas Bareiša opens his sophomore feature, Drowning Dry, with a bang. Well, technically, it’s a kick. The Lithuanian filmmaker wastes no time jumping into the ring with Lukas (Paulius Markevičius) as the martial arts fighter lands a maneuver against his opponent in a match.
A Sensorial Tale of Memory Loss

3 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

About an hour into Familiar Touch, Sarah Friedland’s feature directorial debut, a subtle yet striking stylistic rupture occurs. The effects of dementia on octogenarian Ruth Goldman (Kathleen Chalfant) grow gradually more pronounced as her stay in assisted living stretches on. In gentle gestures—most frequently a pronounced pause—Chalfant renders what the disease takes from her character by making present an overwhelming sense of absence.
'The Brutalist' 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: A24

4 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer |Jake Cole

Even though it also concerns an architect fighting entrenched elites to achieve his singular vision, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist doesn’t bow before the altar of The Fountainhead. Yet he takes a gauntlet thrown down early in King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel—no place originally exists in architecture, and the past cannot be improved upon—more seriously than either Vidor or Rand.
Miguel Gomes on the Artifice and Artistry of 'Grand Tour'

4 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

Few working filmmakers today combine rigor and playfulness in their approach to their art, and with such aplomb, as Miguel Gomes. Over the past two decades, the Portuguese director has enchanted both festival circuit and arthouse crowds with his inventive approaches to deconstructing cinema’s unique relationship with artifice and time. Grand Tour finds Gomes at his most approachable yet inscrutable.
Barking Up a Familiar Tree

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

Those who live in the Tri-State area—or are masochistic voyeurs of Manhattan real estate—may experience writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend more like a home-invasion horror film than a drama. Writer and professor Iris (Naomi Watts) can afford to live in the West Village off of Washington Square Park thanks to inheriting a rent-controlled unit from her father.
Coming of Age, With and Without the Cheese

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Marshall Shaffer

Characters say the titular euphemism of Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow multiple times throughout the film, usually in a context that bears some relation to a cow. Its first utterance, though, is in response to a show of human folly, when a bystander at a fairground uses it to express shock at the commitment with which teenage Totone (Clément Faveau) responds to a drinking game dare by stripping nude for all to witness atop a table.