Bill Bria

The recent handful of films that utilize a style called “Screenlife” — real-time looks at a character’s desktop or smartphone display that tell a story through various social media apps — have so far been the best representative of the way we communicate and navigate our lives, especially when in crisis. LAKEWOOD, a new thriller from director Phillip Noyce, writer Chris Sparling and star Naomi Watts, flips the “Screenlife” concept around, showing very little of the iPhone screen of Watts’ Amy...

The old fable of the dog with two bones tells the story of a dog who, upon seeing another dog with a bone in its mouth, opens its own mouth to try and take that bone, too, and loses both, realizing too late that he was only looking at his reflection in the water. ENCOUNTER is a “dog with two bones” movie, a film that approaches its story from two different directions and ends up losing both. It’s an approach that’s befitting of its lead character, the ex-Marine Malik (Riz Ahmed), who late one...

The rule of thumb used to be — and still is, for the most part — that genre films were the best way to address thorny real-life issues that may be too sensitive to deal with directly. Yet the more horror tropes and mythological characters are utilized, the more they can be moved away from their standard trappings and into other, more grounded ones. The vampire is arguably the most ubiquitous of all classic horror creatures, and thus there aren’t many subtextual aspects to them left untouched....

The opening moments of writer/director Anita Rocha da Silveira’s Medusa are absolutely riveting. The 2021 film begins with a long, unbroken shot of a woman performing a provocative, animalistic dance, until that footage is revealed to be an online video being watched by a young girl while traveling on a bus. The girl later walks down an alley somewhere in Brazil that da Silveira and her crew present as a space that looks right out of 80s Italian horror films, all harsh neon and saturated prim...

The “punk” mentality and persona is ultimately one that dead ends in self-destruction. It’s not hard to see why such a lifestyle is attractive and intoxicating, especially within the music industry: it’s loud, brash, challenging and aggressive. Yet in much the same way yesterday’s radicals become today’s conservatives, punk artists tend to end up railing against progressive politics and join — deliberately or by happenstance — what they perceive to be the most alternative group, which is usua...

While numerous actors help represent the respective decades during which they came to prominence, there are only a few who feel more like mascots of that decade, their image evoking the politics and culture of that time. Michael J. Fox feels affixed to the 1980s in this fashion, thanks in large part to his role as Alex P. Keaton on TV’s “Family Ties.” That sitcom’s basic premise—a middle-aged liberal couple who were hippies in the ‘60s must deal with their teenage, Young Republican son—acted ...

Anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can see how much inventiveness is possible in filmmaking these days. While YouTube, Tik Tok, and other such platforms don’t necessarily provide opportunities for narrative depth given their typically bite-sized runtimes, many users demonstrate time and again that there is a ton of talent and uniqueness to be displayed in terms of sheer craft. Given that motion pictures themselves began life as a sort of magic trick, it’s a tradition in cinem...

The way genre can be used to explore and enhance thematic material isn’t a secret anymore. Horror films used to be routinely dismissed at face value, thought of as distasteful or juvenile with no redeeming qualities. Given that “prestige horror” has gradually become a thing since the late 1960s, with horror movies looking and feeling almost indistinguishable from mainstream dramas, it’s easy for such films to let the trappings of the genre substitute for any drama by itself. Martyrs Lane is u...

Seeing as how most classic cinematic horror characters come from European myths and legends — the vampire, the werewolf, and so forth — it’s easy to forget that North America has its very own horror creature of ancient legend: the Wendigo. The creature comes from Native American roots, to be precise, stemming from the myths of the Algonquian people. While not as well-known as Dracula or the Wolf Man, the Wendigo has nonetheless been the subject of hundreds of novels, stories, television episo...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, people lamented the anticipated deluge of television and films that were to follow in its wake, expecting the usual lazy exploitation of a worldwide event. Now over a year into the crisis (with, unfortunately, no obvious end in sight), the initial rush to capitalize on it has passed by, with more thoughtful works cropping up as the pandemic continues. GLASSHOUSE is one of these films, a movie that adopts some of the iconography of life during COVID to give it...

The opening shot of Hotel Poseidon is a lengthy one-take tour of the practical sets built for the film. It begins on a dead fish in a drained tank, then moves through a series of rooms and corridors, each one dank, decrepit and generally repulsive. As composer Kreng’s lurching, almost retching strings and tones writhe on the soundtrack, a series of objects make up the title of the film when properly aligned. The shot makes for a rather perfect introduction to the movie: meticulously construct...

Desperation is one of the strongest emotions that film can evoke, in part because it has so many layers to it that beget dramatic possibilities. It’s an emotion that can range from quiet to loud, from small stakes to large ones, and its consequences can have both hilarious and deadly effects. At the core of BABY MONEY is desperation, with its ensemble of characters struggling through one long night to try and achieve the most favorable outcome for themselves and their loved ones, even if that...

While far from the world’s first cult movie, 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show became one of the films that helped define the term. Its eventual success and transformation into a phenomenon blindsided pop culture, with the film released during a time when neither movie musicals nor Gothic horror were particularly en vogue, and its satiric tone and envelope-pushing queerness baffled the mainstream media. In retrospect, it’s clearer how writers Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman, adapting O’Bri...

Perhaps the foremost tragedy of humanity is that we’re all made to die. The very act of living ensures that the human body will become corrupted by not only disease but simple wear and tear. The one mitigating element to this fate is that the destruction of the body happens so slowly as to be mostly imperceptible, our minds having enough time to come to terms with our bodies. The notion that this change could be unnaturally accelerated has long been a staple of horror and science fiction, app...

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Once upon a time, making a movie about Superman seemed like a daunting, bizarre idea. While producers Pierre Spengler and Alexander and Ilya Salkind simply saw the potential dollar signs in a franchise film, early writers on the project couldn’t get around the fact that the hero of the piece ran around in red underwear, stood for such concepts such as truth and justice (unfashionable for protagonists in the 1970s) and came from the pages...