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Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021)

A world premiere is always an exciting thing, and all the more so when it’s a midnight horror screening at the Sundance Film Festival. You can read my review of the throwback psychological-horror thriller Censor on The Arts Fuse.

Censor deftly explores the interplay of censorship, free expression, public morality, violence, sexism, insanity, human nature, and even the line between truth and beauty in art. (One key insight worth pondering: the more absurd and over-the-top the gore is, the more obviously fantastical it must be — and thus, paradoxically, the more acceptable.)

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Thankfully, Bailey-Bond’s touchstone here is empathy, not prurient sadism. As we witness the effects of a toxic blend of images on Enid’s psyche as she confronts the world’s horror, we fear for her, but we feel for her as well. Most impressively, the director — one in a growing cohort of women directors intent on saving the horror genre from gratuitous sadism and its past gorification of misogyny — reminds us of what we should truly fear: the scariest thought imaginable is not to be the victim of a monster, but rather to become a monster oneself. (In this respect, Censor can actually be considered a direct descendant of a deeper horror tradition: tales of Dracula, the werewolf legend, and most pre-Walking Dead zombies were all terrifying not for what they might do to us, but for what they might make us do.)

This one is a bit of a departure from our normal “city in film” fare, but it was also a real scream — quite literally — with a lot to say about the interplay of media and society. Read the full review here.

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Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)

I had a lot of fun reviewing Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland for The Arts Fuse, which was nicely paired with a commentary from Peg Aloi.

In the same year you got your license, you saw Easy Rider at the drive-in and were turned on by Canned Heat singing “Going Up the Country” at Woodstock, followed by a steady diet of “Going Mobile,” “Going to California,” and counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike. The highway was calling and you rose to answer — but then life intervened, with a husband and a mortgage and a job at the gypsum plant and shopping lists and gutters to clean and 1,001 other daily responsibilities and hassles, and being on the road was just something Willie Nelson would sing about on the jukebox.

And then like that, decades later, with a whoosh of the undertow and a great sucking sound, the plant closed and the bottom dropped out of the world and everything that was once stable evaporated – husband, job, house, community – and all that was left was you and the road again….

To read more, see The Arts Fuse — and be sure to also read Peg’s commentary on the site as well. (And for fun, check out this Nomadland “filmerick”, too.)

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Herself (Phyllida Lloyd, 2020)

Now out on the Arts Fuse, my review of Herself, Phyllida Lloyd’s new feature produced in partnership between Amazon Studios and Screen Ireland.

Through this classic cinema framing, we come in for the close up: by watching Sandra’s story — by attending to this particular life, as lived and experienced slowly, by this individual — we may hope to understand a more general story playing out elsewhere.

Sadly, this “elsewhere” is more accurately an “everywhere,” as there are loads of Sandras not just in Dublin, but in Dayton, Durban, Dallas, Dubai, Delhi, and Da Nang — as well as right here in Boston and its suburbs. Based on a true story and reminiscent of too many others, Sandra is a mother fleeing an abusive spouse, hoping to find a safe home for her children in a world where even something this simple would seem to require a miracle.

To read the full review, click here. To watch this film, head to Amazon Prime.

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Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Ross Brothers, 2020)

I had a great time reviewing the new quasi-documentary, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, directed by Bill and Turner Ross, set in an staged recreation of a dive bar, but exploring some very real interactions. It’s a super film that really stretches the limits of the medium.

Here’s a teaser from my write-up:

The tone is what critics love to call “elegiac,” but one senses that using such language in “The ’20s” (as the bar is known to locals) might earn you the titular bloody nose, so we’ll just say it feels like the bar is hosting an Irish wake for itself. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tonight we die” could well be the subtitle for the film – or perhaps an updated and more accurate NSFW version, given the multiple paths to “merry” taken over the course of the night: “Eat, drink, smoke some weed, drink some more, fool around a lot and fondle a little, fall down a few times, pick a fight, drink some more and make up and hug it out, for tomorrow we finally accept the fact that we’ve all died a long time ago….”

To read the full review, head on over to The Arts Fuse.

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Some Kind of Heaven (Lance Oppenheim, 2020)

Lance Oppenheim’s debut docoumentary, Some Kind of Heaven, is a deep, thoughtful, complex portrait of life in The Villages, Florida’s planned New Urbanist retirement community.

Like a day in a Disney dream-land, the “heaven-on-earth” glow of life in The Villages ultimately fades — quicker for some than others — and rather than rich fulfilling nourishment we are left with nothing but the sickly false-taste of artificial sweeteners. Alas, it would seem, humans are not so easily fooled by murals and mirages, by facades and fabrications, try as we might to self-deceive. Somewhere deep down, our inner souls crave the sustenance of real community and honest spiritual meaning; we are not easily satisfied with a fiction or a lie.

Read my full review of the film on Arts Fuse.

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