The Game is a film about awareness and relationships, with Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), a wealthy businessman protagonist who keeps the world at a considered distance. Van Orton reduces almost all relationships to services – an that fits the capitalist economy in which he operates. His world is constructed of near-hermetically sealed spheres: the private […]
Author: Rohan Berry
Adam Wingard uses close attention to sightlines and shot-reverse-shot editing to atomise and dislocate relations in a grief-stricken New Mexico family in their 2014 horror-thriller The Guest. The Petersons have lost their eldest son, Caleb, who has died in combat whilst fighting for the US army. The unexpected arrival of David (Dan Stevens), a charismatic […]
With Ruby Sparks (2012), is Zoe Kazan attempting to deconstruct that most idealised of ‘noughties’ cinematic tropes, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or MPDG)? And if so, just where will a sensitive ‘new’ man be able to go from there to reassert his ‘masculinity’? Calvin Weir-Fields, the ‘wonder boy’ author at the centre of Ruby […]
For most of La vie de Jésus Bruno Dumont has his audience riding pinion with a gang of bored young motorcyclists. They roam aimlessly around a widescreen rendered, rural northeastern France, waiting for their lives to happen, or for someone to merely notice they are there. However, a potentially racist act of violence towards the […]