Screen Rats

Anton Bitel provides a look at six titles heading to streaming and physical media releases this month that you should add to the top of your shopping list. The Bla…

S hamira Raphaëla originally set out to make a film about the aspirations of four teenagers living in Rotterdam’s De Peperklip social housing complex – a striking arch…

N otably fond of deadpan dada and off-the-wall gore, director Quentin Dupieux (Rubber, Deerskin ) delivers these by the bucketload in loony Super Sentai pisstake, Smok…

I n Vincent Sherman’s 1950 noir The Damned Don’t Cry, Joan Crawford plays a housewife trapped in a loveless marriage, when the tragic death of her young son becomes an…

A rizona-based author Alan Dean Foster has been turning movies into novels since the early 70s. Today, he has an extensive portfolio of film novelizations under his b…

“T en years ago I heard Lubomyr Melnyk perform for the first time. Playing 40 notes a second, the 74-year-old pianist conjures transcendental landscapes and imagistic …

L éonor Serraille loves headstrong, emotional women. The French director burst onto the Cannes scene when, in 2017, she won the Camera d’Or (the prize for the best fir…

“See the child,” Cormac McCarthy instructs us in the first line of his novel ‘Blood Meridian’. Similarly, in the opening scene of 2013’s The Counselor, McCarthy – thro…

A few years back, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal depicted the difficult adjustment of a drummer to life without hearing, leaving behind an artistic field so dependen…

S o many films that are considered essential queer cinema do not have happy endings. Brokeback Mountain, the love story between two cowboys in Wyoming based on a novel…

A film about not being able to keep a good Nazi down feels very apposite in the current climate of rabid conservatism, and so that might go some way to justify the ex…