The Latest Reviews For The Country Austria

The sea is always a great setting for a story. It’s both soothing and menacing; water is cleansing and purifying, and a consistently replenishing source of food. But it’s also dangerous and uncompromising. Water is one of nature’s greatest antagonists, it can get into virtually anything, softening it, weakening it, eventually breaking it apart. But nothing on earth would survive without it. It’s a brilliant metaphor for so many things, as it’s constantly changing and moving and covers wondrous and monstrous secrets. It works even better in visual mediums like TV and film because it’s beautiful to both look at and listen to. The CW’s new eco-thriller, The Swarm, makes good use of its watery locations in establishing an aura of tranquil menace: everything seems calm and orderly, but there’s trouble bubbling up just below the surface. Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Continue Reading →

Force Majeure wasn’t one to spell itself out. It didn’t have a traditionally satisfying conclusion. Its morality was ambiguous at best. Hell, its most intimate moments approached its characters like an anthropologist looking at a family as a tribe. But while that informed the worldview of Ruben Östlund’s film, it also provided much of its style. Several scenes watched people from afar, the camera peeking through rooms only to see a fraction of the subjects in something close to a profile view. Continue Reading →

Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's documentary about tension in the small village of Congo Mirador is both singular and specific. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) As the night sky shines a modicum of light over the Venezuelan village of Congo Mirador, the heat lighting begins. It’s a regular phenomenon too: a constant cycle of near darkness blinded by strobing curlicues that weave in and out of the clouds. Thus comes our first decent sight of the location. Mirador, located in the country’s northwest Zulian Region, bleeds from Colombia on its west to the Caribbean Sea on its northeast. The community, however, stands above Lake Maracaibo, which, ranks as one of the planet's oldest lakes at anywhere from 20 to 36 million years. It’s just recently that citizens have made it work economically and environmentally, but the once-thriving locale has begun to sink. At least, not according to Mrs. Tamara, whose allegiance to the Venezuelan government precludes any real worry about the area’s wellbeing. She sports posters Hugo Chávez on her wall; she collects dolls of the former president and displays them with pride. Continue Reading →