Long Live the Pope‘s Secrets!: Edward Berger’s Conclave

By Elias Savada. Berger’s take on the Catholic Church makes Conclave a thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride.” The Pope is dead; long live the Pope‘s secrets. Papal riddles abound in this most peculiar political page-turner set in the Vatican, and the hunt for answers through every nook and cranny also finds […]

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion: M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap

By James Slaymaker. Shyamalan’s careful misdirection reveals much about his protagonist, the society he lives in, and the capacity of cinematic form to perpetuate dominant cultural values.” Spoilier Alert In the final sequence of M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024), there’s a moment when Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), a serial murderer […]

Red Rooms: The Strategic Antipathy and Empathy of Emotional Contagions

By David Ryan. Writer-director Pascal Plante connects the complicated mechanisms of justice, social contagions, and psychological complexity to explore two dominant themes: the film contrasts the courtroom’s brightly lit (and tightly-controlled) semiotics with the digital world’s illicit market economy.” Red Rooms or Les Chambres Rouges (2023) focuses on the questionable […]

Outsiders on the Frontier: Kitty Green on The Royal Hotel

By Ali Moosavi. I knew that I didn’t want to see violence. I feel like I’ve seen enough sexual violence in cinema…. I was like how can we make a movie about the threat of that. And the threat of that should be enough to feel scared.” The young Australian […]