David Cronenberg
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Top 5 Films about Killer Kids
Sure, children are our future. But what if they turn out to be our demise? Whether kids are compelled to murder through the extremity of a situation or because they are seemingly rotten to the core, the idea that precious innocence can be twisted into something hideously unrecognizable continues to be a terrifying trope of […] More
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Best Films of 2015 so far (part 3)
Picking the best movies that come out in any given year is no easy feat. With over 800 movies released theatrically, there’s plenty to digest. As we reach the halfway point of the year, we decided to publish a list of our favourite movies thus far, in hopes that our readers can catch up on […] More
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Best Films of 2015 so far (part 2)
Picking the best movies that come out in any given year is no easy feat. With over 800 movies released theatrically, there’s plenty to digest. As we reach the halfway point of the year, we decided to publish a list of our favourite movies thus far, in hopes that our readers can catch up on […] More
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Best Films of 2015 so far (part 1)
Picking the best movies that come out in any given year is no easy feat. With over 800 movies released theatrically, there’s plenty to digest. As we reach the halfway point of the year, we decided to publish a list of our favourite movies thus far, in hopes that our readers can catch up on […] More
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Media Matters: David Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’
In the Sci-Fi realm of Videodrome, and within the design of Cronenberg’s fertile imagination, the technologies at the heart of the film are so much more than mere devices. More
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With ‘Crash’, Cronenberg further proved himself to be a filmmaker ahead of his time
While the 1996 adaption of J.G. Ballard’s novel of the same name isn’t entirely Cronenberg’s deformed brainchild, his chilly, detached direction lends itself perfectly to the atmosphere and mood of the film that portrays the streets of Toronto as a sea of machinery and metallic debauchery. This doesn’t, however, undermine the layer of humanism that’s trying to budge above the surface. The film ultimately chronicles characters trying to do something they don’t know how to achieve, and the inherent sadness and contradiction of trying to connect on a humanistic level through the passionless, cut off nature of machinery. More
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Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes Of The Future’ is an example of a filmmaker’s reach exceeding his grasp
A lot of even very excitable David Cronenberg fans have never seen his 1970 film Crimes of the Future: it seems to be seen as something of a curate’s egg and dark and imaginative, of course, like everything he does, but perhaps made too long ago now, and surely overshadowed by his later work. It was his second film, after Stereo in 1969. Stereo is a similarly short feature film dealing with telepathy, sexual exploration and, like Crimes of the Future, had its commentary added later: it also starts Ronald Mlodzik wearing black and looking terrifying. More
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Two Difficult Artists Created a Difficult Film About Art with ‘Naked Lunch’
Horror is a genre of ideas, of what ifs turned into terrifying flesh-and-blood monsters. In the 1980s, David Cronenberg emerged as a renouned horror director for his willingness to explore dark avenues of thought, rather than burying them beneath layers of screaming teenagers and half-baked plots. Despite his genre of choice, too often considered a […] More
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With ‘eXistenZ’, David Cronenberg Out-Matrixed ‘The Matrix’
In 1999, The Wachowski siblings released a film that is now one of the biggest pop culture phenomenons of today in The Matrix. It followed Neo, a young man who finds out that his world is nothing but a virtual reality constructed by machines, while the reality is that the world is a desolate wasteland […] More
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The Naked Ambition of ‘Eastern Promises’
Creating cool fight scenes has never been easier in the current age of filmmaking. Special effects have evolved to the point where the eye can rarely discriminate between what is real and what isn’t, while choreography is much more sophisticated than it was in the past, and there’s no shortage of cash to throw at action films to get everything done just right. So with all of these advances going in modern film’s favor, why aren’t more fight scenes memorable? More
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The Rise of A.I. in Sci-Fi
Every decade has their cinematic science fiction obsessions which speak to its concerns of the age; in the 1950s films such as Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Them! capitalised on fears of alien invasion and nuclear proliferation. In the 1960s films like Barbarella and Ikarie XB-1 captured the hopes and dangers of space exploration […] More
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‘The Tenant’ is a psychological puzzle
The Tenant Directed by Roman Polanski France, 1976 Featuring Roman Polanski’s last major appearance in one of his own films, The Tenant completes the director’s look at paranoid city life, begun with 1965’s Repulsion. Polanski plays Trelkovsky, a shy man who becomes convinced that his neighbors are scheming to drive him to suicide. Like Rosemary’s […] More