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Reviews
Split (2016)
Amazing similarities between this and an old episode of Glory Days
Someone has noted the curious resemblance of this movie with the third episode of the TV series "Glory Days", created by Kevin Williamson? It's the episode "Miss Fortune Teller" and not only the villain (this time it's a girl) have multiple personality (if only three)but the girls kidnapped have some moments very similar to the reactions of the girls in Shyamalan movie, and the stage of his confinement place it's too very similar in both cases. I'm not saying it's a voluntary copy. Maybe both, Shyamalan and Williamson, being very smart connoisseurs of horror/mystery conventions have taking his stories of the same sources, but in any case I recommend you to see this curious episode of "Glory Days" and, after all, the complete t.v. show "Glory Days", a little underrated and very enjoyable for fans of mystery/horror and of Mr. Williamson clever thrillers.
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
A powerful combination of realistic western and horror cannibal movie
I just see yesterday night the movie at the Sitges Fantastic Film Festival of Catalunya, and I only can praise the insight of his director and writer. As a great fan of both, dirty & twilight westerns of the seventies and horror splatter movies, I found very natural that combination, as we see a couple of times before. But I have to say that the fine drawing of characters, a little bit a la "Unforgiven", in combination with the slow but atmospheric and realistic pace of the timing, plus the brutal and gory explosion of final violence and crude action, works absolutely superbly, better than I expected. As personal variation on the classic cannibal Italian movies of the 80s, I think its a lot more honest and stylish than, by the way, Eli Roth's "The Green Inferno", and as twilight western with tragic and violent overtones, it remind me the best western ever made about the confrontation between white men and native Americans in the last Frontier times: Robert Aldrich's "Ulzana's Raid". If you like splatter survival from the 70s and 80s, and melancholic, demystifying, sad and violent westerns, if you read books like Jack Ketchum's "The Crossings" (wich is very much alike) and appreciate weird westerns as Mulligan's "The Stalking Moon", this is your movie.
City of Dark (1997)
A disturbing science fiction cyberpunk minimalistic thriller
This is the second feature film from Spanish-Canadian Bruno Lázaro, and it's again a disturbing and elegant movie. Is a sort of cyberpunk thriller, entirely shot in black and white, setting in a near future, when people have to live and work in cities at night, because the solar radiation makes impossible life by day... Or it seems. The main character is a scientific, working for a private company, who are creating a computer scanner with the capacity of reading the dreams and memories of human mind, and alterate them too. Soon (spoiler), a girl, kind of hacker, discover that his work is used by obscure powers for more dark purposes than science: total control over population. Besides the well constructed intrigue, in the path of Phil Dick or William Gibson, the real point is the beautiful, inventive and disturbing use of architecture and urban spaces, seeing "the imminence of the future in the present", in the way of Godard's "Alphaville", Marker "La Jetée" or the first Cronenberg -"Stereo" and "Crimes of the Future-. Poetic, intimate, sexy and experimental, it's minimalistic SF at his best, like "Pi" or "Primer", and an acid critic to consumerism and mind control.
The Traveller (1989)
A sensitive piece of anthropological and personal drama
This is a little but very intelligent and sensitive movie, by a Spanish Canadian movie maker and film teacher, and a real surprise for all lovers of art cinema. It's about the personal quest of a strange character, a Canadian professor, expert on native culture, who leaves the teaching for selling Indian masks, but return to the university and begins a long travel in search of forgive and sense. He was raised for the natives in his childhood, and following the signs -mainly a raven who sees constantly flying over him- he must return to the woods to learn how to live according to his two cultures, and to pay his debts. But this is not melodrama. I'ts pure cinematic art, with not too much talking, impressive sound editing and beautiful and intriguing images. Intimate, slowly paced and fascinating, the first film of Lázaro Pacheco reminds me of Peter Weir, Herzog, Bergman and Nicolas Roeg. A beautiful and intriguing piece of magic realism, with a disturbing use of the native imaginary and myths, and with an open and bitter end, maybe not for all tastes.