The various circumstances where life challenges people are often couched in metaphorical terms like “fights” or “battles." This implies the potential for a decisive “victory” (or even “defeat”) at some nebulous future moment. Grief is one such emotion encouraging these descriptions. Show Yourself, a sophomore feature...
Scientists call it the “anthropocene,” our current age where human beings possess a dominant influence on climate and the environment. It flows with a biblical idea that humans are separate from the planet's other animals. Showing no mercy, the award winning Finnish Thriller Euthanizer is a dark...
Evil mothers are a staple of Horror movies, maybe movies in general. They are either killing people themselves, like in 1994’s Serial Mom, being a spaceship and refusing to not blow up and kill Sigourney Weaver, in 1979’s Alien, or just plain killing people through their...
“New Year, new me,” right? This cliché is just as guaranteed to drop from a lame friend as the ball in Times Square, and in The Night of the Virgin (aka La noche del virgen), a first-time feature by Director Roberto San Sebastián, change certainly comes for our...
Art is art and science is science, or so the world has been led to believe. Some artists think they are social scientists and some scientists find their work to be art. And then there is Soft Matter, coming to VOD Tuesday, May 22, 2018...
After an extremely awkward moment at her birthday party, family pariah Moll (Jessie Buckley: War & Peace series, Taboo series) bolts for her house. Eager to forget her family’s fake sentiment, Moll grabs a drink but cracks a glass. Collecting the pieces in her hand,...
One constant in American cultural life is that when it comes to the wealthiest among us, people either love or hate them. Middle-class Americans will watch them on TV or read about them on the internet. They will either be enamored by opulence and its...
Cults seem to be having their moment in the American zeitgeist. There are the television series Waco and Wild Wild Country. There is the burgeoning story of Smallville’s Allison Mack and her involvement in the sex cult Nxivm. There is the constant talk around “cults...
“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,” a seeming proverb reads, curiously scrawled on a diner chalkboard where one may instead see the daily special. Truth is a strange concept in a world populated by human beings defining their realities...
It is the year 2030 and the United States has fallen into chaos thanks to a moribund economy and the ravages of global warming. Amid these crises, an organization is given the power to determine whether or not American citizens are productive enough to remain...
