All Slights Deserved

Gustavo Hernández's supernatural horror attracted some attention on the festival circuit by virtue of its principal gimmick: it was filmed in a single unbroken handheld shot and takes place in real time. There's nothing new about this; Hitchcock ostensibly did the same thing with Rope (albeit cheating due to the technical limitations of the time) and more recently Alexander Sokurov deployed it with his Russian Ark . It's probably more useful to consider The Silent House in the context of horror's ongoing flirtation with vérité techniques in the pursuit of more authentic and visceral frights; a tradition that stretches from Night of the Living Dead to The Blair Witch Project to Paranormal Activity . Yet despite that the plot harkens back the golden era of Victorian supernatural fiction, with a certain Henry James novella being a particular influence, I suspect. Loosely inspired by real-life events, it tells the story of Laura (Florencia Colucci ), a young woman ...

Latin American cinema is almost a complete mystery to me. To the best of my knowledge the sum total of my viewing consists of Amores Perros , City of God and Santo vs. The She-Wolves . I was hoping I could also include El Perro , a rather odd seventies picture in which The Exorcist 's Jason Miller plays a fugitive chased across Venezuela by a relentless dog; but it turns out to have been a Spanish production.  Either way, you can see it's not exactly an impressive return. Yet the consensus amongst film critics and scholars is that the region has made huge strides in the past decade, even if the general English-speaking public aren't paying much attention. That Mexico, Brazil and Argentina now have prospering national cinemas is perhaps not so surprising, but Chile and Uruguay are also getting in on the act. Of course it's all relative and Hollywood still dominates at the box office. It would be remiss if at least a handful of the intended (but don't count on ...