Horror is a detail-oriented genre. So often the effect of frightening audiences is achieved through the smallest gestures: a swinging light bulb, a creaking floorboard. The film A Quiet Place is an ingenious riff on this phenomenon, turning every last sign and hum into an occasion for fear. The film opens on a familiar post-apocalyptic landscape.
Based on the novel by Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation is director Alex Garland’s film about a strange location in the Florida panhandle known as Area X. Three years ago, an event of some sort began altering the natural properties of the area. Scientists at a government research facility called the Southern Reach began investigating Area X, but discovered little. Surrounding Area X is what’s known as the Shimmer. It looks like an enormous soap bubble, and it forms a dome over the entirety of Area X, blocking all radio waves and video signals. The only way to explore Area X is to physically enter it.
Halt and Catch Fire uses the restlessness of the technology sector as a yardstick for measuring the characters’ own desires to shift and change, their relationships pushing and pulling with every dip in the stock market.
Jamie Quatro on how to write about sex and spirituality.
Sara Pulliam Bailey, Karen Swallow Prior, C. Christopher Smith and James K.A. Smith discuss ways to converse with civility.
Fear is the starting point for The Shape of Water, the latest film from director Guillermo del Toro. The story takes place in Baltimore during the 1950s, and draws on the reality and the fantasy of that era – the headlines and the movies, one could say – to craft a fable about love.
A young boy goes missing in the woods. His friends and family in a small town start looking for him. A strange accident at a scientific facility comes to light, leading to even more unusual goings-on. Is this Stranger Things?
This is where the question of the film’s relatability becomes most pertinent, I think. Who hasn’t wanted to get out of the place where they’re from only to find that they miss it? Who doesn’t want to change the name they were given only to discover they don’t want to forget who they are?
It’s here that the film takes on a contemporary significance that I didn’t expect. Take a look at the world today and you’ll see income inequality, the rich becoming gods, and the poor becoming sick. The jobs that are available seem to require a measure of dehumanization just so one can accomplish them, with every cashier at a fast food joint effectively a replicant. Simply being human is starting to seem untenable.
The Sympathizer is one of the most accomplished war novels in recent years, right up there with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The story of a North Vietnamese secret agent working with the Southern Vietnamese forces, it finds new ground in subject matter that has been examined by writers too numerous to count. To understand its significance, however, will require a little history.
|
Uploaded
Failed
|
 |
