Forbidden Power is out on Vimeo on Demand!

Movies, Films and Movies already covered the Forbidden Power film a few months back. This science fiction mystery thriller by Paul Kyriazi is definitely a release that has easily set itself apart from the rest of the global independent scene thanks to both its topic and the ambitious delivery. On the festival scene, it already got a range of nomination and won Best Special Effect and Best Young Performer on the AOF MegaFest.

Now, the same film has appeared on a new online streaming platfrom. The entire Forbidden Power is now available on Vimeo on Demand, where it can be watched or streamed to a smart device. Overall, I'm genuinely impressed with this Vimeo service so if you did not try it out so far, checking out Forbidden Power is the perfect moment.

Film Review: Dark Fortune (2016)

Copyright: Corinth Films

There’s a strong and hard-to-pinpoint sense of terror that runs deep in Dark Fortune. At moments, this hard-hitting family drama could be even confused for a toned-down horror film, all thanks to that existential fright that reverberates through not just the plot, but the characters themselves. In the film, the feeling of being scared of something is almost visceral for the viewer. The same emotion does not come from monsters, but something much worse - buried memories that have so much hidden power over the lives of those who suffer from them.

The film, directed by Stefan Haupt, is set in Switzerland where a psychologist Eliane gets an emergency call. Her hospital just received Yves, a young boy who is the only survivor of a car crash that took the lives of four other people - his parents and siblings. Now, he is alone, left with only his aunt and grandmother, who are actively feuding about his future.

Film Review: Dede (2017)

Copyright: Corinth Films

There is a deep-rooted and ancient strength locked in the sight of mountains. These distant and seemingly eternal elements of our world seem to have seen it all - they have been a silent witness to humanity in all of its struggles, glory, and despair. Through all of it, the mountains and their frozen peaks remained unmoved by the stories of mankind. They simply witnessed them. In the Dede movie as well, the entire tragic story plays out framed by the mountain peaks of Georgia. Located in the heart of Eurasia, this country and its isolated province of Svaneti is the setting in which a simple yet heartbreaking story of the movie takes place. It starts with an event that is never mentioned or shown in the film - the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the onset of the Georgian Civil War. In Svaneti, two fighters arrive in a small village, looking for the women that promised to David, one of the pair. His comrade, Gegi, follows him, but knows that a difficult time is ahead - the girl in question, Dina, does not want to become a part of the marriage arranged by her grandfather.

Two Paragraph Review: Sorry to Bother You (2018)

You can’t deny that this movie is different and it does not take too long for it to drive this point home. In the alternative world of ultra-capitalism, Cash, the main character, played by ever-more relevant and popular Lakeith Stanfield, just tries to get by. However, this soon brings him to a company working on the process that would eventually change entire humanity and not for the better. With this plot, Sorry to Bother You moves between a grotesque social drama and a weird dark comedy.

The cast and the acting continue to be uneven throughout the film, making it hard to gauge who is what type of person and what do they actually want. I’m not sure if this is intentional or a strange by-product of so many things being odd, but for me, it made the film something that failed to engage. The grotesque nature of the world reverberates with the characters, including Cash, so why empathize with anyone - maybe all that is strange to me as a viewer is normal to the inhabitants of the alternate world - it’s all make-believe inside of a bigger make-believe. The critique of the real-life greed as a driver is plain and called for, but the space in which it was delivered simply did not manage to impress me on any level.

Short Film Review: Them! (2018)

The great thing about the indie short movies is the fact that they are able to explore spaces that most feature-length films, especially those made in the studio system seemly cannot do. Them! is a short sci-fi comedy that definitely goes to weird places and does the same pretty fast. Here's how the film describes itself:

Them! is a sci-fi movie. A lady hears her dog yelp and it wakes her up. When she goes downstairs to see what is the matter, she is horrified to see the dog being eaten by a Roomba and they have multiplied.

The film, directed by DeNoise Studios and starring Susie Butler, cannot be easily described beyond the word “strange” at first viewing. The plot is condensed and so is the runtime of the film, which is short even for a short feature. However, aside from its overall strangeness, there are multiple threads to the piece. 

Two Paragraph Review: Hold the Dark (2018)

The worlds of Jeremy Saulnier are dark and deadly, but ultimately, like any vampire’s castle, too alluring to miss out on. Even as the protagonist enters into the creaking halls of that place of horror, we know they’re as good as dead (or most of them, at least). In Blue Ruin, a lost man embarks on a doomed quest. In Green Room, a punk-rock band goes to a gig they should have turned down. In Hold the Dark, an expert on wolf behavior sets off to an isolated village in Alaska to find the remains of a boy taken by the same creatures.

There is nothing to find in the film, like in the previous ones, expect pitch black desperation, cruelty and an unmissable sense of nothingness. Yet, the ride itself is still what allows us to usher them on, into the twilight. Here too, the experience of the movie and the twist and turns its plot embarks upon so elegantly and completely unexpectedly, make it a worthwhile experience. It is reassuring to see that the creative universe of Saulnier is completely inoculated from the spellbound power of bigger and bigger budgets. Hold the Dark has a lot to offer even though what that thing exactly is remains lost to me.