A lurker in the river makes itself known in Gareth Edwards’s Monsters Chris Forrester praises the underrated early work of blockbuster filmmaker Gareth Edwards. Before he became the face of the “almost good!” blockbuster with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and The Creator (2023), Gareth Edwards made a name for himself with a… Read more »
Entries by Chris Forrester
Radiohead’s Cinema of Sound
Still from Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” music video Chris Forrester extracts what makes Radiohead’s albums Kid A and Amnesiac — which are the score to a recent rerelease of 1922’s Nosferatu — such enigmatic and rewarding works. “I had never even seen a shooting star before… I looked up. I thought it was fireworks…. Read more »
Lost in a Forest, All Alone: The Beast (in the Jungle)
Léa Seydoux stands against a green screen in the opening of The Beast Chris Forrester dissects the heady themes of Bertrand Bonello’s genre-defying romance and the Henry James novella that inspired it. Spoilers ahead! “The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say… Read more »
Respecting the Balance
A biological miracle with disastrous consequences in The Substance Chris Forrester connects Coralie Fargeat’s award-winning body-horror sensation The Substance to its B-movie roots. As is now something of a tradition with buzzy festival hits, The Substance (Fargeat, 2024) almost immediately became the subject of a discourse whose least productive concerns have more or less eclipsed… Read more »
The Space Between: Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas
The lonely poetry of Paris, Texas Chris Forrester rhapsodizes about the overwhelming emotionality and breathtaking imagery of Wenders’s 1984 masterpiece. When Wim Wenders — then known for his contributions to the New German Cinema, in particular a string of road films through which he formed a close collaborative relationship with legendary cinematographer Robby Müller —… Read more »
A Perfect Machine: James Cameron’s Action Sequels
Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator II: Judgment Day Chris Forrester articulates how James Cameron films like Terminator II and Aliens work so well as sequels with established iconography and higher stakes than their predecessors. James Cameron has conquered quite a few things through his nearly 40 years in Hollywood — among them the blockbuster, the epic… Read more »