The View From The Mountain

The very first time I saw The Black Hole was in a movie theater with my father. I was fifteen years old then, and was readily anticipating a new science fiction epic, this time produced from the Disney Corporation. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture ) had opened the week before, but at that point I still hadn’t seen it. My Dad decided to splurge and make it a double-feature, SF-flick weekend for the both of us, and we saw The Black Hole first. We would see Star Trek: The Motion Picture the following day (my retro-review of ST:TMP is forthcoming). Re-watching The Black Hole forty years later, I’m struck at how good the film is--at least in its first twenty minutes. The deep space exploration vessel Palomino, under the command of Dan Holland (the late, great Robert Forster) finds a massive black hole along its flight path. But it also discovers something even more amazing: a large ship that’s parked right on the black hole’s event horizon, seemingly unaffected by it. A search through...

Ari Aster strikes again with Midsommar . The horror auteur, who broadsided us with Hereditary just last year, is back with another in-your-face horror thriller that pulls no punches. Florence Pugh stars a Dani, a young woman who suffers a terrible tragedy early on in the film when her sister kills herself and winds up inadvertently killing their parents in the process. Understandably flailing with grief and misery, Dani seeks comfort in the arms of her manipulative lover, Christian (Jack Reynor), whose relationship with Dani has been suffering some setbacks shortly before receiving the terrible news. Several months later, Christian and friends receive an invitation to visit Sweden by Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who lives there in a commune. One is tempted to describe the people who live in this commune as being a cult, but Aster effectively masks this suspicion on the part of his characters (who wisely suspect it at the very beginning) by having them trying to be politically correct ...