Disturbingly

If you’ve just watched Ari Aster’s new horror-comedy “Beau Is Afraid,” you probably have a few questions. Or maybe a lot of questions. Like, what was that?As with his previous films, 2018’s “Hereditary” and 2019’s “Midsommar,” Aster packs a lot into his surreal, alternately funny and nightmarish three-hour head trip through the mind of a middle-aged man named Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), whose attempt to return home to visit his mother turns into a hellish odyssey of anxiety, guilt and shame. But he would rather not do the…

The stress of living through pandemic lockdowns has accelerated aging in the brains of teenagers. The effects are similar to those previously observed as a result of violence, neglect, and family dysfunction.Even if you've left adolescence far behind, you might remember that it can be a tumultuous time in terms of thoughts and feelings, and there's a lot of reorganizing that goes on in the brain – even without a global pandemic and the associated lockdowns.A recent study by researchers from Stanford University and the…

This gory, lowish-budget thriller is quite competently made on a technical level, with umbral cinematography that is choreographed down to the millimetre along with the flash-cut-heavy editing and shrieky score and sound design. But it is not exactly a fun watch unless you really like lots of violence and jumbled-timeline puzzle stories. It feels like a calling card effort for the team that made it, which includes the co-writer and director, Keene McRae, making his first feature here as well as taking a supporting role,…

via 20th Century Fox Remakes of popular horror movies have been all the rage for the last two decades, but what happens when a project initially announced as a retread of another film gets scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up? Well, in the case of Alexandre Aja’s 2008 terror Mirrors, nothing good. Initially set to be a straightforward redux of 2003 Korean hit Into the Mirror, the genre veteran responsible for High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes V2.0 found himself to be dissatisfied with the specifics of the…