Rocco Thompson

6 days ago | slantmagazine.com | Rocco Thompson

The American dream in all its slippery indefinability and spurious promise is the guiding light of Daniel Minihan’s On Swift Horses, based on the novel by Shannon Pufahl. In the tradition of The City and the Pillar, Giovanni’s Room, and The Price of Salt, the film looks at midcentury gay and lesbian life as a series of quotidian tragedies of compromise in the pursuit of health, wealth, and happiness.

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Rocco Thompson

Few things make us question the grammar of cinema and the limits of its capacity to emulate real horrors like the topic of war, a fact that Alex Garland is keenly aware of and tackles head on in his new film Warfare. Co-directed by Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza, the film is based on the memories of the SEAL team members who lived through a mission that went wrong in November of 2006 in Ramadi, the most populous city in western Iraq.

3 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Rocco Thompson

There’s a scene toward the end of Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare in which Al Qaeda insurgents step onto a quiet street, the air thick with smoke from spent artillery and the ground littered with human remains. Where moments before an apocalyptic firefight was ensuing, now there’s only calm.

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Rocco Thompson

“Look closer,” exhorted the tagline for a certain 1999 best picture winner that could just as easily apply to Mimi Cave’s thriller Holland, which seeks to find the rot beneath the veneer of American suburbia. In Fresh, Cave’s feature-length directorial debut from 2022, misogyny is literalized as cannibalism, but the rot is harder to boil down to a simple metaphor here, underlying everything like decayed animal matter that feeds a bed of tulips.

1 month ago | slantmagazine.com | Rocco Thompson

Goofy, high-concept horror efforts succeed or fail based on more than just the talent involved or their dedication to the bit. Christopher Landon, as evidenced by genre mashups like Happy Death Day, Freaky, and Heart Eyes, understands that when the stakes are sky high, the emotions need to be firmly grounded.