Remaking Robert Hamer's 1949 British classic Kind Hearts and Coronets—the greatest Ealing Studios comedy and, in my own fevered opinion, the greatest film of all time—needs the chutzpah of Cecilia Gimenez, the amateur Spanish artist who restored a painting of Christ and left him looking like a gibbon.
Lestat gets an interesting alert on his tablet: a new book by Daniel Molloy called Interview with the Vampire is about to come out. Louis tries to defend himself, claiming he destroyed Molloy's laptop and didn't know the book, written with a cloud-based copy of Molloy's data, was being published until a month ago. But Louis' failure to warn him just bristles Lestat more.
Netflix and Universal were very kind to let me go direct Scream VII and put some projects on hold. Now I'm focused on those. The first is a TV show based in the Universal monster land. It won't skimp on Williamson's penchant for melodrama, either: he compared the project to an adult Vampire Diaries, which we've not really gotten from him before.
Narrated by the wayward ghost of Mary Shelley, Gyllenhaal's loopy, overstuffed fable is maddeningly uneven and just plain mad, in both the furious and off-its-rocker sense. I liked it more than any movie I've also considered walking out of.
Looking to the Middle Ages for answers to the perennial puzzles of life can seem quaint, even artificial, a long reach across centuries marked by violence, hierarchy, and exclusion. And yet medieval culture offers a way of thinking about love that still speaks to the present. If love is most urgently tested in moments of strain and upheaval, then it is in those moments - where care is stressed or obscured - that its meaning comes most clearly into view.
Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).
Protagonist Edna Pontellier, heartbroken and hopeless, swims out into the Gulf of Mexico until her body tires and the water swallows her up. The act is impossibly sad, but it also feels as if it's not about itself. Or rather, it expresses something about the act, choice, of suicide that so often remains out of focus: how hard our world is to live in.
While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.
After years of slapdash sequels and waning fandom, the Camp Miasma slasher franchise is handed over to an enthusiastic young director for resurrection. But when she visits the original movie's star, a now-reclusive actress shrouded in mystery, the two women fall into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.
Grief-porn, in relation to cinema, would suggest that the film in question is emotionally manipulative, formulaic; grief-art would suggest the film unleashes feelings both universal and true. It's curiously circular. In a film about grief, the valorised quality is depth of feeling; it stands or falls by how profoundly the hero(ine) experiences emotion, and the audience proves its acuity, buys itself into the imaginative contract, by its ability to mirror that profundity.