celluloid consommé

Laila (Manisha Soni) lives in Bhopal on her own, working with marginalized and underprivileged people facing constant hardships in their lives. Laila herself faces these issues, one night returning home to be harassed by a neighbor at her door demanding she perform sexual services for him. After a harrowing night, she decides to move out but the landlord has extorted her out of living expenses and decides not to refund her deposit money, saying that “her kind isn’t welcome here.” Laila is a trans woman struggling to exist in Madhya Pradesh, India. Her job is welcoming and caring, and her best friend Roshni (Muskan) is always there to support her, but in searching for a new and safe living situation they both run into similar prejudice from other property owners and tenants. Judgmental comments and looks from others who fashion themselves as the epitome of normalcy in society pour out towards Laila and Roshni as they try only to find a safe place to come home to each night. Roshni opens...

Hugh and D.K. Welchman’s  Loving Vincent  released to universal acclaim in 2017, where the visual medium became a little more innovative and collaborative: animated over physical performers, the filmmakers used van Gogh’s style in painting each frame evoking the mood of his works as it told their story of what may have happened in the last days of his life. The Welchmans have broadened their scope considerably with their adaptation of  The Peasants  by Władysław Reymont. Their efforts in bringing his 1000-page tome chronicling peasant life in an early 20th-century Polish village focuses on Jagna (Kamila Urzędowska), an unwedded young woman who becomes noticed by the rich farmer Boryna (Mirosław Baka) after his wife passes away, but not before his son Antek (Robert Gulaczyk) catches her eye. The story is told in four parts and takes place during each different season within a year’s time. Despite the novel’s simplicity, D.K. and Hugh Welchman’s reworking of the source...

Damien LeVeck’s second horror feature sees a release from Well Go USA. Blu-Ray and DVD box & disc art photo courtesy of Well Go USA. Holiday horror is something we’ve been getting a lot more of these days, and while some of it has been things fans of the genre have been asking for a good chunk of the rest is stuff we didn’t want in the first place. Some is made just to say it exists now, with no real care in the craft of a good story or experience where cost-cutting measures and the look or feel of a low budget is at the forefront of its marketing, somehow used in lieu of a good hook for its viewers. Why should we care? Because it’s low budget and movies are notoriously hard to make! Watch our low budget film! For the most part Damien LeVeck’s sophomore horror film does not exhibit any of the above traits, and has set up something of an admirable gambit in making a creature feature. It is certainly a low budget affair, but does not go out of its way to show you that it is in any at...