If there’s one writer who doesn’t pull punches, it’s Ryū Murakami. His shuddering novel Audition (translated into English by Ralph McCartney) is compressed into just above 200 pages, yet it leaves you reeling and confounded in the best way possible. Later adapted for the big screen in 1999 with Takashi Miike as the director, the film leaves an equally lasting impression, but with contrasting techniques.
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If you’ve ever been a die-hard fan of bands, you know that few things are more heartbreaking than hearing about your favorite group splitting up. Taylor Jenkins Reid has always been interested in this phenomenon of members suddenly disbanding for unknown, mysterious reasons, and explores this in her best-selling fiction book, Daisy Jones and The Six. Exposing the messy rock ‘n’ roll scene in the ’70s, the novel also takes its music to life in Amazon Prime’s TV adaptation of it. Here is how they compare to each other:
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The Evil Dead franchise is crowned a cult classic based on its consistently successful amalgation of unfettered gore and slapstick humor—Evil Dead Rise takes those elements and boxes them just to make it a little more claustrophobic than the previous instalments.
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Director and writer Jordan Peele returns with yet another horror movie—this time in the sci-fi horror subgenre. With his focus on the menacing extraterresterial, Peele conveys the terror and allure of looking at danger right in the eye.
Diverting a little more from the likes of his previous works, Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), Peele came up with a new way of challenging the audiences’ views by exploring the pursuit of showcasing and chasing a spectacle. We’ve all heard of the phrase, “.. like a car crash that you can’t look away from,” and the film embodies that.
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“This is a safe space .. for everyone.”
When an LGBTQ+ conversion camp adopts a so-called “kill ’em with kindness” mantra, how far can they really go?
If there’s one thing I love, it’s punny titles. So when I heard that there’s a brand new queer slasher called “they slash them,” I had very high expectations and hoped that the film would be as clever as the title. Directed and written by John Logan, the film specifically focuses on a group of queer kids sent to conversion camp, where they’re supposed to find the “root cause” of their identities and analyze them. Queer representation often exists in a more subtle context in horror, and while it’s getting more overt with the current times, it is still rare to see the LGBTQ+ community take roles as the surviving main characters or heroes.
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Scott Derrickson once again dives back into the horror sphere, this time adapting Joe Hill’s short story, “The Black Phone.” Combining Ethan Hawke’s terrific performance along with the supernatural elements, the adaptation induces goosebumps reminiscent of ’70s horror movies.
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Found footage horror movies can be hard to execute well—but director Kevin Ko delivers Incantation as an intriguing mockumentary, inviting the audience to go on a horrifying journey inundated with curses.
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A vampire hunter tries to stake a Legacy vampire’s heart.. but ends up stealing it instead.
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Films and TV shows with LGBTQ+ representation are thankfully becoming better and better—in the past decade, we’ve had films where queer people are no longer just the sidekick, propped up to provide comic relief, or are merely there as a token. Of course, stereotypes will still be present in some films today, but there are now more diverse LGBTQ+ experiences and stories in cinema than ever before.
In honor of Pride Month, I’m sharing a list of my personal top LGBTQ+ films and TV shows of the past decade:
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What if your thoughts intersected with someone else’s—and your identity and sense of reality become completely warped? Similar to his debut film Primer, Shane Carruth heavily focuses on identity using slow, layered, unique and intricate scenes that convey one’s humanity in Upstream Color.
A pretty experimental film that makes your head scratch at times, this is the type of subgenre that truly captures a person’s subconscious in a nonlinear way. The premise can be described as “basic” in the sense that it’s simply about a parasite affecting people’s mind, but it’s more so metaphorical than plot-driven.
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