Audiard: Dheepan (2015)
From a distance, Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or-winning film looks like social realism. For one thing, it’s a film about immigration – in this case, from Sri Lanka to [...]
Articles by Billy Stevenson
About Billy Stevenson
Eggers: The Witch: A New England Folktale (2016)
Sometimes the best horror films seem to elude the classification of horror altogether, or at least make you question exactly what it is that distinguishes horror from [...]
Stone: The Daughter (2016)
I almost didn’t see The Daughter, Simon Stone’s first feature as film director after a long stint at the Belvoir. From a distance, it looked like exactly the kind of [...]
Brize: La Loi du Marché (The Measure of a Man) (2015)
Every year at the Cannes Film Festival there are a handful of French titles that seem to get less press and less distribution than the rest of the lineup. While there are [...]
And Then There Were None (2015)
Although Agatha Christie is famous the world over for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, her most adapted work is And Then There Were None, originally released under the rather [...]
Malle: My Dinner With Andre (1981)
The premise of My Dinner With Andre is disarmingly simple: a pair of old friends meet at a restaurant in New York and spend the evening talking. With the exception of a very [...]
Ferrara: Ms. 45 (1981)
Although Abel Ferrara had released one or two features prior to Ms. 45, this rape-and-revenge extravaganza really feels like his first sustained transition from adult to [...]
Les Revenants (The Returned): Season 1 (2012)
Over the last couple of years, horror has become more and more prominent as a television genre. From the increasing critical acclaim of anthologies like American Horror Story [...]
The Staircase (2004)
If one single genre defined television in 2015, it was true crime. Bookended by The Jinx and Making a Murderer, it suddenly felt as if “quality” television had fled [...]
Craven: Cursed (2005)
Wes Craven’s follow-up to the Scream trilogy – and his last film, along with Red Eye, before My Soul To Take in 2010 – is one of the most perplexing horror films I [...]