The Babadook Movie Review

It might seem strange to recommend a horror movie as something that every parent should see and pay close attention to, but The Babadook, the feature debut from Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent, is a treatise on the aspects of parenting that people tend not to talk about. It is a sort of psychological horror film clearly inspired by and borrowing from Nosferatu as equally as The Exorcist, Halloween, and even A Nightmare on Elm Street.

From My Collection: Bright Star Movie Review

Depicting an artist at work in a film is a tricky thing. The possibilities are greater when dealing with the visual arts because the process of creation is dynamic. But when it comes to filming the story of a writer, what can the filmmaker do to depict process? After all, what is a writer’s process in the majority of cases if not to sit at a desk and think…and write…and drink coffee…and think…and wait for ideas or inspiration? This does not make for very interesting cinema. So the most interesting films centered on writers tend to focus on something that is only tangentially connected to the writing or the finished product. Jane Campion’s Bright Star was a mesmerizing love story to me when I first saw it nearly four years ago and it remained so when I watched it again recently. The movie circumvents the problems of filming a writer’s life and work by making the story about the poet John Keats’ three year unconsummated love affair with Fanny Brawne.

Animal Kingdom Movie Review: All in the Family

Josh, or J as he is known to family and friends, is a kid trying to survive the harsh circumstances of his life. When we first see him he’s passively watching the television with a passed out woman by his side. The paramedics burst in and ask what she took. “Heroin,” he utters as he continues to pay more attention to the banalities on the idiot box than to his dying mother on the sofa.

If that scene doesn’t jolt you with its impassivity, then the next one almost assuredly will. We see J on the phone saying, “Hi Grandma. Mom’s gone and ODed and she’s died.” When she responds, “Oh, are you all right?” we know everything we need to know about her. We imagine J has lived a grueling existence with a drug addict mother who, it should be noted, kept her son sheltered from his grandmother and uncles. James Frecheville plays him as a kid detached from life trying to find his place in a world that seems to have nothing but cold indifference toward him, a point somewhat clumsily made by the film’s title, Animal Kingdom, and the detective who tries to help him.