Movie review: "Mandy"

THROND'S CHOICE
directed by Panos Cosmatos
written by Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn

For several years now, Nicolas Cage has been largely banished from mainstream cinema. Since 2013's Joe and excepting the occasional Paul Schrader joint, the Oscar-winning, internet-beloved actor has been largely relegated to direct-to-video dreck, and low-budget trifles. Recently, however, that's begun to change, with Mom and Dad receiving a cult following out of TIFF 2017, and Teen Titans Go! To the Movies casting him as none other than Superman himself.

But neither of those movies has accumulated as much momentum as Mandy, Panos Cosmatos's mesmerizing, intensely stylized, frequently absurd evocation of both B-movie pulp and prog-rock grandiosity. Cosmatos blends self-serious, droning aesthetic experimentation with pandering machismo, creating a hallucinatory, genuinely transporting landscape all in the service of watching Nic Cage kill biker lizardmen and druggie cultists. This film's perverse blend of highbrow stylings and lowbrow content marks it as perfect cult film material.

Movie review: "Searching"

dir. by Aneesh Chaganty
written by Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian

In 2015, a small film called Unfriended caught the public's eye through its unconventional approach to horror. This was a film set entirely on a laptop screen, and while reactions were mixed, the film was successful enough to warrant a sequel this past July. It remains a novel gimmick, and one which resonates with modern anxieties about technology. Aneesh Chaganty's Searching takes the same approach to a straightforward mystery thriller, and it's such an obvious fit that one wonders why it hasn't already been milked to death.

Searching is certainly a novel and clever approach to mystery storytelling, but it's also one which finds the thematic hooks such an approach begs for and exploits them for all they're worth. By the end, the film has become a character study, not of its missing subject but of the protagonist who is doing the searching. Its approach is imperfect, but the film smartly reminds us of how the internet allows us to develop dual identities, and it also reminds us of how discovery can reveal as much about ourselves as what we're discovering.