Sara Clements

The love story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a Greek myth about a man who tried to bring his wife back from the dead with music. It's been told in different ways, but each version ends the same: Hades allows Orpheus to take his love back to the world of the living, but he must not turn around to look at her until they reach the surface or she will vanish forever. Believing Hades has tricked him, he turns around. In her 1944 book of essays, The Unquiet Grave, author Cyril Connolly wrote, "Miserab...

AfterEllen’s Heather Hogan referred to [Cracks] as “just another lesbian boarding school love story.” It’s a popular theme and Cracks has sat comfortably alongside many other lesbian films that deal with teacher-student relationships, like Loving Annabelle and Mädchen in Uniform. As I’ve gotten older, though, my interpretation of the film has changed, and I realized that maybe it doesn’t belong there. I don’t think it belongs alongside other LGBT stories because it’s not a lesbian love story at all, unlike the aforementioned two films where the love between two women is expressed quite...

As DC fans wait for the next entry in the Margot Robbie-Harley Quinn saga, Birds of Prey, Warner Bros has given audiences one of the best animated series of the year (sadly unavailable to UK viewers at present). While the Batman villain has made appearances in many animated films and TV shows, her titular series is a whole different beast.

Harley Quinn isn't the PG, kid-friendly animation we're used to seeing from DC, and while the series doesn't have a rating yet, it's vulgar and violent. It...

Rian Johnson can do it all. He’s directed a space opera; episodes of a neo-western drug-fueled crime drama; an action, time jumping caper; a neo-noir mystery; and now a whodunnit. While the whodunnit trope is still popular in novels, party games, and escape rooms, this comedic guessing game of crime is a type of detective story that is no longer a plot that is utilized as much as it used to be. And Johnson’s latest film, Knives Out, questions why it doesn’t get a revival. Toying with the clas...

The “final girl theory” is meant to describe the trope in horror films of one female character being the last to survive, having to defeat the killer, and live to tell the tale. While Carol J. Clover originally coined the term in her 1987 essay Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film and applied it mainly to American slasher films of the ’70s and ’80s, it’s still used in contemporary cinema in a variety of horror films to describe the surviving female character. As slasher films have se...

From the creative mind behind Despicable Me and Smallfoot comes Netflix's Klaus, a Christmas movie nearly 10 years in the making and one of the most charming animated features of the year. The holiday film about Santa's origin story re-creates the hand-drawn, 2D magic that's often been missing since Toy Story introduced 3D computer-generated imagery in 1995. But here, writer-director Sergio Pablos brings the tradition back, gifting the audience with a nostalgic visual style to create a heartw...

The Angels are back. And while their hairstyles have changed over the years, one thing has stayed the same: they kick ass. In a couple of years full of films that scream "girl power," Charlie's Angels does something different. While the movie does begin with Kristen Stewart saying, "I think women can do anything," it doesn't force progressiveness by making its stars utter cringe-worthy lines of dialogue to get that point across. It actually shows its girl power, which is what makes writer/dire...

“Eat well, stay young, live long.” This is the motto that Doctor Sleep’s villain, Rose the Hat, lives by. It’s a motto that we all apply to ourselves, whether we speak it aloud or not. This is especially true for women, as staying young is a goal we all strive towards because god forbid we age. And, really, we’re not allowed to. We have to be Rose the Hat forever, and in a way, we want to be.

The latest Stephen King adaptation introduces the True Knot, a band of cult-like vampires who torture...

The Ground Beneath My Feet is writer-director Marie Kreutzer's take on the 21st century working woman. It's a jarring confrontation, a mirror placed in front of the audience to show how we're working ourselves to death. In an article for Psychology Today, economist, Robert Frank, states that to many of today's rich (it could also be attributed to anyone a part of office culture), leisure is a myth. Work is their fun and their play, becoming their identity instead of just an aspect of their ...

For the classic film community, November is a month where we celebrate one of the most influential genres of the 20th century: Film noir. These were the stylish, black and white Hollywood crime dramas technically known for their shadowplay, low lighting, and with their narratively distinct plots involving crime, corruption, sex and drugs. According to various film scholars, there were many genres that influenced film noir: gangster films, police procedurals, Gothic romance, the social conflic...

Acts of violence, violation, and corruption—this is what the world looks like. “When will it end?” you wonder. It probably never will. “Has the world always been like this?” Sadly, the answer is yes. But what makes Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit a must-see is because it’s so pointedly relevant to what’s going on in the world at this moment. Drawing on his own experiences with prejudice growing up Jewish, writer-director Waititi makes a powerful and humorous satire of Nazi culture, a statement ag...

Sea Fever swallows you up in its first frame. The dark echos of the sea’s depths feel claustrophobic and unfamiliar, like an unknown lake plant grazing against your foot while you’re swimming. It’s uncomfortable. It’s frightening. You can’t see what’s down there. This unknown, the film’s stunning underwater visuals, the hums of the drowned underworld, and the creaking shell of a once lively vessel make Neasa Hardiman’s latest feature a triumph in atmospheric horror...

In 1932, RKO Radio Pictures released The Most Dangerous Game, a survival thriller about a man who hunts humans for sport when four survivors take shelter in a castle on an island at sea after their boat is capsized. The castle is home to a Russian count who is a hunting enthusiast, but what he hunts aren’t animals of the tropical variety. This idea of a hunter and its prey is a big part of horror narratives. There’s almost always an innocent being chased by a hunter wearing a mask. A most dan...

Director Kurtis David Harder, producer of Harpoon and What Keeps You Alive, has crafted a film whose title, Spiral, is symbolic of the endless cycle of hate that plagues the world and America in particular.

Set in 1995, the film follows same-sex interracial couple Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and Aaron (Ari Cohen) who, along with Aaron’s teenage daughter Kayla (Jennifer Laporte), are moving out of the big city and into a small town; however, Malik is haunted by trauma in his past, as the fi...

From Poltergeist to Return to Oz to The Shining, critics re-visit the terrifying moments of a movie fanatic childhood.

When you’re a kid, every movie is a transporting experience, like peeking in a keyhole to some new reality beyond. You feel the fun, the joy, the wonder. And sometimes the shattering terror. The monsters you had imagined creeping the corners of your mind or darkened bedrooms prowled in full horror on the screen. The awful, awe-inspiring power of witnessing something frighteni...