A mother named Ana is celebrating her daughter's birthday when a strange man named Walter shows up asking about her husband, Ricardo. What seemed like an awkward visit quickly turns into a tense and dangerous situation, where Ana begins to uncover dark secrets about her husband's life.
“I’m always interested in exploring female fantasy, and the sexy witch is a loaded archetype that is simultaneously about men’s fears and fantasies about women, and women’s feelings of empowerment and agency. So whereas we are used to seeing the sexy witch or the femme fatale from the outside, I wanted to explore her from the inside.” - Anna Biller, on why she made The Love Witch
Is God Is tells a harrowing tale of retribution, sisterhood, and gender based violence. Far too eerie and clever to be an ordinary slasher, but too gory and merciless to be an ordinary thriller, Is God Is will appeal to the highbrow horror lover with generational trauma anywhere.
The trainwreck is hot but tame.
Perhaps the most amazing and groundbreaking quality about The Birdcage is how removed it is from both illness and insensitivity. Whereas films preceding it were often somber stories about the tribulations of being gay in a conservatively straight world, Nichols and screenwriter Elaine May expose the fallacies of conservatism as traditional values are thrown into a more open-minded space. They don’t care how far the community has fallen so much as how high they can rebuild themselves.
Ultra-violent storytelling has never been my thing, but the issues with Scarface go beyond that. The film perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Latinx immigrants and uses gore and misogyny for shock value that never serves any purpose. The whole venture is frustratingly empty, and left me desiring something more.
Knives Out doesn’t just defy the whodunit narrative, it uses the weaknesses to its advantage. It’s well aware of the genre’s faults and tropes
