Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) is a woman at the beginning of the end. Her breakthrough film is being remade, her ingenue role recast. The director (Malcolm McDowell) who groomed her for stardom and groomed her, full stop, is being knighted, the remake that threatens to eclipse her renown […]
Rummaging around for a spooky film for my Gutter submission for October, I decided upon Kohraa, (“The Fog”), a 1964 Hindi adaptation of Rebecca. Rewatching Kohraa and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) back to back, I’m struck by how much more isolated the Indian protagonist is. Kohraa spends most of […]
Ghoul (2018) is as bleak as might be expected for a series that starts with the line, “Strike a deal with your blood and out of the smokeless fire the ghul will come.” It’s a three episode miniseries that addresses fascism, state terror, and individual guilt in a […]
The unlikeliest story of the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival – more than Taylor Swift or Harry Styles or the presence of any celebrity – is undoubtedly the path Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker has taken to instant notoriety. The recontextualizing of the events in Todd Phillips’ Joker […]
Although I never wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, for some reason I always feel oddly nostalgic watching movies or shows with children of the 1950s and 60s who are obsessed with exploring the galaxy. I was born a bit after Neil Armstrong and […]
“Secret Base’s mission is to enjoy fascinating, funny, and weird stories that just happen to be about sports. Many of the stories we tell are true. Some are strange, irreverent experiments that break the fundamental rules. Some we make up out of thin air. In short, we’re having […]