Adapted by Eleanor Perry from a strangely beautiful eleven-page novella by John Cheever and directed by Perry’s husband Frank, The Swimmer retains the plot economy and intensity of its concise source material, making up for the gaps in detail with things Cheever couldn’t give his readers in even a thousand pages: zany, sun-drunk cinematography, a swooning theatrical score, and character embodiment by the likes of Burt Lancaster and Joan Rivers (in her film debut). How solid is the line dividing gothic suspense from trauma porn? This “feeling” is very much what director Max Winkler is aiming for in his own Jungleland. It’s a wonderful moment that’s remembered long after a final bit of self-reflexive foolishness. Their interactions set off an increasingly unsettling series of events, as Sarah's creative process and a possible real-life murder begin to blend dangerously together. Jungleland has one moving scene, in which Stanley and Lion’s resentments come to a boil at a pizza parlor, but these characters are otherwise reduced to pawns who’re pushed through increasingly unconvincing genre-film machinations, in a production without a good genre film’s liveliness. Although these influences are as apparent any other element in Come Play (Oliver communicates Larry’s presence to adults through creepily scrawled crayon drawings), the look of the monster is the film’s most effective visual idea. Grief can be difficult to express in a concrete and truthful manner, posing a challenge for artists that filmmaker Johannes Nyholm briefly and joltingly overcomes in Koko-di Koko-da. Based on screenwriter Isa Mazzei’s own experiences as a cam model, the film is neither plainly sex positive nor outright cautionary in its depiction of Alice (Madeline Brewer), an up-and-coming streamer whose account is hacked and stolen by someone appearing to be her doppelgänger. The utilization of slasher-film motifs in the service of exploring grief also doesn’t make much sense. Curiously enough, this contradiction of pairing old and modern, fantastical with realistic, is something today’s viewers will likely notice more than The Swimmer’s contemporary audiences did. In retrospect, though, it’s best approached as an artistic wellspring for Ozon and his main character. Cast: Gillian Jacobs, Azhy Robertson, John Gallagher Jr., Winslow Fegley, Rachel Wilson Director: Jacob Chase Screenwriter: Jacob Chase Distributor: Focus Features Running Time: 105 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2020, Enter to Win DVDs of The Great, a Blu-ray of Back to the Future: Ultimate Trilogy, and More, Our Preview Section Is Your Most Complete Guide for All the Films Coming Your Way Soon, We’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or subscription fees—so if you like what we do, consider becoming a SLANT patron, or making a PayPal. No such haziness exists in Bezucha’s stolid screenplay, which is closely drawn, often verbatim, from Watson’s scenes. Nichols has an easy mastery of pacing and tension, employing a churning sound design (and a pulsing score by David Wingo) that allows moments of occasionally bloody action to arrive with a frightening blast or a deep, quaking rumble of bass, and the film moves with purpose to its final destination. Formally, the sequences come out of nowhere—jarring like the tragedy that the couple faces—and are pointedly at odds with the aesthetic of the remainder of the film. James Joyce might have applauded this Phil Dick-caustic/Gnostic rendition of his Nighttown from Ulysses, with Clementine as Joel’s face-changing Penelope/Molly Bloom. Cam is also one of the first American films to grapple with the realities of being doxed to family and friends, further demonstrating its primary acumen as a check on the social pulse of a particular strain of U.S. conservatism that continues to think about and patrol sex work, and those who participate in it, in even pre-Reichian terms. The film now exists in a twilight of an era in which factory-produced entertainment could still serve as a keyhole into a dimension of weird, through which we might glimpse the otherworldly, and contemplate fondling the third breast. It’s difficult to capture the perils of sexual awakening in young people without coming across as prudish, but Chopra never depicts her protagonist as either stupid or insensibly provocative, instead patiently and shrewdly observing the contradictions of human behavior that Dern conveys. As flighty and self-absorbed as the average teenager, Connie whiles away her summer days thinking about boys and quarrelling with her conservative mother, Katherine (Mary Kay Place), who openly favors her older daughter, June (Elizabeth Berridge), and belittles Connie as lazy and a good-for-nothing. Koko-di Koko-da is intellectualized and predigested, abundant in fraught yet self-conscious signifiers that are either derivative, such a shot of a spider in its web, or willfully random, like a white cat in the forest or the dead dog that the stereotypically “weird” carnies have with them. Our aesthetic perception is linked to our perception of Henry himself, so that the film becomes a study of empathy through aesthetics. As they respectively evolve as craftspeople, Flanagan and Bertino have developed opposing limitations as artists. Plagued by dreams and visions of ravens that augur the possible onset of the depression and delusion to which her mother succumbed, Charlotte is slow to react to her situation when she awakens from a fainting incident in Margaret’s estate. Because Julie is French, she’s a whore. (Tellingly, the death of the livestock here is more moving than the brutal demises of any of this film’s humans.) The film has an eerily WTF arbitrariness that should be the domain of more films in the genre. Chase introduces two new wrinkles to this formula: The first is that the monster’s home dimension is the electronic realm of smartphones, tablets, and the electrical system, and the second is that the child, Oliver (Azhy Robertson), has autism and is nonverbal. And some of our favorites are currently streaming on Netflix. Keith Watson, With Mud and Take Shelter, writer-director Jeff Nichols has already used withholding narratives to weave distinctly Southern tales about fringe believers, survivalists who could also be seen as evangelists. Complementing Jane’s portrait of coiled wrath, Molly Parker physicalizes the fear that informs every minute wrinkle of Arlette’s relationship with her husband, which the character attempts to paper over with bravado, inadvertently sealing her doom. Cast: Sean Cameron Michael, Liesl Ahlers, Reine Swart, Steven Ward, Suraya Rose Santos, Craig Urbani, Kayla Privett, Michael Lawrence Potter, Russell Crous, Cameron Scott, Paige Bonnin Director: Alastair Orr Screenwriter: David D. Jones Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films Running Time: 90 min Rating: NR Year: 2020. This time, armed with a bigger budget and greater chutzpah, he goes about setting up the ultimate morality trap: Mr. Peterson’s game is designed to expose his victims for what they are—selfish, soulless members of a spoiled generation—and the audience is supposed to wonder which among them will first succumb to their murderous impulses. Margaret, who apparently yields much power in their small community despite the decline of the aristocracy, cooks up a conspiracy to keep the forthcoming baby in England. But they’re united by their fearlessness in breaking down boundaries and thrusting us into worlds beyond our own. Vacationing at her agent’s French country house, she invites (and subsequently builds) a mystery when the agent’s daughter, Julie (a perpetually naked Ludivine Sagnier), appears on the scene and challenges the older, proto-Agatha Christie’s sanity. Cast: Marin Ireland, Michael Abbott Jr., Xander Berkeley, Lynn Andrews, Julie Oliver-Touchstone, Tom Nowicki, Ella Ballentine, Mel Cowan, Mindy Raymond, Chris Doubek, Michael Zagst Director: Bryan Bertino Screenwriter: Bryan Bertino Distributor: RLJE Films Running Time: 95 min Rating: NR Year: 2020. Connie’s half-flippant, half-frightened approach to the possibilities of sex reaches an apotheosis that’s as anticlimactic as it is devastating, with the film leaving unseen and unsaid the denouement of her entrapment by Arnold while making clear that she’s been deeply rattled by it. This scene is staged with assured offhandedness, allowing us to feel the shock of sudden death, and it’s later complemented by a haunting pair of hand-drawn sequences, in which a pair of rabbits lose their offspring and take vengeance on the colorful bird who played an accidental role in the bunny’s death. Sam Raimi relentlessly fashions the film’s first half as a creepy-crawly sweat chamber with evil seemingly taking the form of an omniscient, roaming camera, gleefully poking fun at his five protagonists along the way. Cast: Laura Dern, Mary Kay Place, Treat Williams, Elizabeth Berridge, Levon Helm, Margaret Welsh Director: Joyce Chopra Screenwriter: Tom Cole Distributor: Janus Films Running Time: 92 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 1985. 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Nothing hinders surrealism more than the sense that its creators are actively working for it, though Koko-di Koko-da is nonetheless difficult to dismiss. As she would the following year in Blue Velvet, Dern nails the devastation of a young woman learning how evil and exploitative the world of men can be, and just as David Lynch’s film ended on a note of society’s mask of civilized jollity reasserting itself in the face of deeper awareness, so, too, does Smooth Talk conclude with Connie, faced with no recourse to change anything, find a way to compartmentalize her rude awakening for the sake of survival. And though Lane’s performance is dauntless and vital enough to animate the more solitary moments in the film, the verbal confrontations between the Blackledges and the Weboys often tiptoe toward ridiculousness in their shapeless hostility. This is less a horror than it is a tragedy, though, so we’re encouraged to feel pity over disgust. Its finale is the most fully annihilative visualization of the Rapture ever put to screen, a mass death rendered as cathartic release from the hell of existence that, in a parting act of cruelty, leaves the broken, suicidal protagonist alive to bear witness to oblivion. But the acceleration toward the cataclysmic finale abandons any such traces of metaphorical nuance. Farah Cheded; May 8, 2018; Revisiting the Disturbing Summer Movie 'The Swimmer', Fifty Years On This prescient take on the American Dream, starring Burt Lancaster, deserves a deep dive. Soon, the couple’s adult children, Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.), return and are caught up in the grips of either demonic invasion or their mother’s insanity.

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