Schumacher wants to honor the endless battle of addiction by resisting finality, though the film’s ending could use a decisive punch. Like the Joyce Carol Oates story on which it’s based, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk feels like it’s told in two halves: one a relatively tame coming-of-age drama, the other its warped, funhouse-mirror reflection. An inveterate alcoholic who lives alone and disheveled, Steve learns that the love of his life, Karen, has died. But what matters here is that the love is real. Ballard may have been right that literary sci-fi has provided all the interesting themes and ideas for which sci-fi in general has become known, but he failed to grasp how cinema has expanded our understanding of sci-fi by pricking at our collective visual consciousness.

It’s Kubrick’s most prescient work, more astute and unsparing than any of his other films (and he had more where that came from) in putting the bleakest parts of human behavior under the microscope and laughing in disgust. Bowen, Tobe Hooper is officially credited for having directed Poltergeist, but it’s co-scripter Steven Spielberg’s fingerprints that are all over this dark-mirror image of E.T.

The primitiveness of the animation paradoxically suggests the enormity of loss, with the gradually dying bird embodying the extinguishing of Elin and Tobias’s love.

To sell this sort fantasy, you need poetry, swagger, or, as the Farrellys illustrated, superb and even moving impudence—you need, in some way or another, to walk your own walk. [9], "Julianne Moore Channels 'Gloria Bell'; J.K. Simmons Leads 'I'm Not Here': Specialty Preview", "Nima Fakhrara to Score 'I'm Not Here' and 'Danger One, "Raindance Unveils Full Lineup, Including Closing Film 'Stuck' (EXCLUSIVE)", "J.K. Simmons is a Haunted Man in First Trailer for Indie 'I'm Not Here, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=I%27m_Not_Here&oldid=965556909, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 2 July 2020, at 01:37.

Triggered isn’t the first time that Orr has mined horror from such Saw-like machinations, as his earliest two features, 2010’s The Unforgiving and 2011’s Expiration, delighted in throwing people into psychological and physical torture experiments under mysterious circumstances. We’re also allowed to notice the poignant pride that Steve takes in getting sober for six months, ordering a Coke and lime at a bar with some degree of strain—a sequence that’s given weight, of course, by our knowledge of how Steve will wind up in the present day. The filmmakers have hit upon something special with the Danvers State Mental Hospital, whose sprawling Victorian edifice looms large over the narrative: A motley crew of asbestos-removal workers, led by matrimonially challenged Gordon (Peter Mullan), run afoul of a baleful, possibly supernatural, influence within its decaying walls. Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams. In real life, the script would be retitled, stripped down, haggled over and shot—transformed into a film that would be viciously contended with, hailed as a classic, and debated endlessly throughout the epochs of time. After one particularly gruesome interlude, Blanche parts from the Blackledges with a snarling, “Maybe you understand my family now.” We sure don’t, but perhaps that backstory would feature the fiery intelligibility that this damp melodrama never achieves.

Sky particularly makes no sense, as she’s present only to goose Stanley and Lion, offering a wan reprise of the bad girl with a good heart. While taking the piss out of the myth of Hollywood as a liberal refuge, this poignant scene also serves as one of Mank’s few moments of true connectedness, among glorified bystanders who embody the complicity and complacency that hounds America then and now. (Tellingly, the death of the livestock here is more moving than the brutal demises of any of this film’s humans.) No such haziness exists in Bezucha’s stolid screenplay, which is closely drawn, often verbatim, from Watson’s scenes. And the opportunity to conjure such a labyrinthine and increasingly sinister impression of community is what excites Fincher throughout Mank. The audience knows early on that something bad is present on this farm and that it’s going to assail this family without mercy.

“The [sci-fi] film has never really been more than an offshoot of its literary precursor, which to date has provided all the ideas, themes and inventiveness. In other words, Steve is an unreliable narrator, and so the film’s dramatic limitations come to echo his inability to see beyond the scrim of his disease and the self-pity it evokes. In showing how algorithms figure into China’s social credit system, in which individuals are tracked and evaluated for their trustworthiness, Kantayya captures a dystopia straight out of Orwell’s 1984, which is unsurprisingly referenced throughout Coded Bias. Mank’s most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness. It takes stones to name your film after the operatic 10-minute closing track to one of Bruce Springsteen’s best albums, 1975’s Born to Run. For much of the film’s first half, Chopra patiently observes the rituals by which the young attempt to forge an identity to present to both the world and themselves. Steve searches his memories.

Chopra homes in on how vast an age difference of even a year or two can seem when, for example, Connie’s friends want to go to a movie, only for the youngest among them to become exasperated when the others are willing to bail on the movie that she now wants to see due to their learning that a group of cute guys are seeing something else. Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias opens with computer scientist Joy Buolamwini discussing her discovery that facial recognition software is terrible at identifying darker faces.

Into the new millennium, horror films have retained their power to shock and outrage by continuing to plumb our deepest primordial terrors and incarnate our sickest, most socially unpalatable fantasies. Buolamwini admits early on in the film that her love of coding stemmed from its seeming detachment “from the problems of the real world,” but what Coded Bias efficiently illustrates is that, if unchecked, the prejudices of the real world will inevitably find their way into AI-driven technology.