Even after sitting through its underwhelming trailer, I held out hope for Franck Khalfoun’s Night of the Hunted (2023). After all, the French writer-director is responsible for 2012’s Maniac remake, which – through its brutal melding of the arthouse with the grindhouse – may be this century’s best slasher. But his latest is a far […]
Author: Thomas M. Puhr
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago and is a regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal and Film International. He is also an editor for The Big Picture. His book Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema is available from Wallflower Press.
“It’s terribly beautiful here,” the priest tells a local woman, describing the landscape of his remote outpost. She agrees, but with an important caveat: “Yes, it’s terrible. And beautiful.” This conversation occurs late in Hlynur Pálmason’s remarkable Godland (2022) and encapsulates the writer-director’s cinematic worldview, one in which horror and grace coexist in unforgiving natural […]
New Release: Pamfir
Leonid was once a legendary smuggler. He could run for miles – supplies strapped to his back – to deliver goods from his Ukrainian town to nearby Romania. But those days are over. He’s just returned home from a work stint in Poland and is now digging a well for the local church. He wants […]
New Release: Prey
Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey (2022) simultaneously pays respect to and gently subverts the 1987 Arnie vehicle to which it is a loose prequel. On the one hand, it grounds the franchise in the simple premise that made John McTiernan’s Predator so effective to begin with: two creatures – one human, one extraterrestrial – going head-to-head in […]
New Release: Il buco (The Hole)
We often associate progress with height – look no further than the post-World War II boom in skyscrapers. In a pre-credits scene from Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il buco (The Hole, 2021), a group of Italian villagers, huddled around a staticky television outside a café, watch footage of a newsman touring one such building. “We are climbing up […]
New Release: Listen
Ana Rocha’s Listen (2020) begins quietly, with shots of clotheslines and tree branches swaying in the breeze: a rare moment of solace in an otherwise breathless family drama. Clocking in at under 80 minutes, the writer-director’s feature debut doesn’t waste any time immersing viewers in what must be one of the most gut-wrenching experiences a […]
Some of The Big Picture’s regular contributors share their choices for the best films of 2021. Part 4. Benedetta (dir. Paul Verhoeven)We should collectively thank the movie gods that Paul Verhoeven is still at it; with Benedetta, he brings more style, audacity, and wit to the screen than most directors half his age. As the titular […]
New Release: Wilderness
There’s that inevitable moment during any relationship in which you glimpse the real person underneath the idealized portrait you’ve created. It could be a small thing – a turn of phrase, a glance – which makes you realize they have a past, that you don’t (indeed, can’t) know everything about them. Justin John Doherty’s Wilderness […]
New Release: Clementine
Still recovering from a recent breakup, Karen (Otmara Marrero) drives to her ex’s unoccupied, secluded lake house. She breaks in by hurling a rock through a window and makes herself at home. The next evening, a young woman named Lana (Sydney Sweeney) emerges from the forest, looking for her dog. She asks for a ride, […]