Not every new movie gets Deadpool-level marketing. Here are six under-the-radar movies that are new to theaters, rent, or home video right now, and that you may want to seek out.
1. Cemetery of Splendor
Strand Releasing
There are two close-ups in Cemetery of Splendor that feel so startlingly intimate, they hit you like a punch. One is of Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas), a housewife who volunteers at a hospital filled with soldiers overcome by a mysterious sleeping sickness. The other is of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), the patient she's been visiting and has befriended during his scattered waking hours. Until they're shown up close, you never realize that the film has held them at a medium distance, but that's how bewitching the atmosphere of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest film is. It conjures up a world in which the magical and the mundane are mixed, and in which the past lurks unignorably beneath the present. In one scene, a medium named Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram) takes Jenjira on a tour of the palace that's since been replaced by a hospital and that's about to be replaced again by something more modern; it's as though the ghost of the building is still standing tall. The languidly paced movie requires some surrendering to, but it's well worth it.
Where to watch it: Cemetery of Splendor is now playing in New York, with more cities to follow.
2. Frankenstein
Xavier Samuel, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Danny Huston in Frankenstein.
Alchemy
Candyman director Bernard Rose has witty ways of modernizing Mary Shelley's novel in Frankenstein. His version of the monster, Adam (Xavier Samuel), is born from a 3D bioprinter, the work of a pair of married scientists (Carrie-Anne Moss and Danny Huston). The two are pleased with their creation, whose superhuman strength and healing abilities have made him almost indestructible, until mutations turn him from physically perfect to grotesque and they try to euthanize him. Instead, Adam escapes and ends up in Los Angeles's homeless population, a malformed adult with the mind and impulsiveness of a toddler.
Rose's ambitions are sometimes outpaced by his materials in Frankenstein, a movie whose visuals and effects can't always keep up with its story. But in telling an iconic horror tale through the experiences of its monster, it builds dread — not through what's lurking in the dark, but with our fears about the harm Adam may cause without meaning it or because he simply doesn't understand. Rose doesn't force his monster into a metaphor for anything; he just brings the narrative into the present day and allows it to resonate as one about the people who are shunted to society's outskirts and treated as less than human — even when one of them isn't human at all.
Where to watch it: Frankenstein is available via digital rental/purchase as well as on Blu-ray and DVD.
No comments:
Post a Comment