Independent films
fromInverse
3 days ago'The Serpent's Skin' Will Fill the 'Buffy'-Shaped Hole in Your Heart
The Serpent's Skin revitalizes YA supernatural horror-romance through a heartfelt queer narrative and nostalgic visual style.
Lestat gets an interesting alert on his tablet: a new book by Daniel Molloy called Interview with the Vampire is about to come out. Louis tries to defend himself, claiming he destroyed Molloy's laptop and didn't know the book, written with a cloud-based copy of Molloy's data, was being published until a month ago. But Louis' failure to warn him just bristles Lestat more.
While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.
Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).
Jamie Campbell Bower gave the standout performance as the big bad in the otherwise ho-hum fourth season of Stranger Things, and in this tawdry but fun occult-themed thriller, like Satan himself, he's back to his same old scene-stealing tricks. Once again, he's not the protagonist but a sinister figure first met literally in the shadows, making ominous pronouncements in that posh-boy accent. When finally revealed, he is dipping his chin and looking up with those uncannily blue eyes like a vogue dancer catching the spotlight. If he keeps at it with roles like this, he could be the Peter Cushing of modern horror, but with catwalk-queen hair, or the goth equivalent of the young Ralph Fiennes in his rent-a-villain era. What's not to love?
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
What is available is the daydream-a limitless realm of freedom. In this other world, one might be famous or rich, finally catch the attention of their beloved, or simply sit on a beach as a waiter brings them cocktails. They might fly or speak to animals, heroically save a child, tell off their boss with no consequences, win the Super Bowl at the whistle, or travel to another continent, planet, or time period. No one can stop them; no one can even object.