FNC 2015

In spite of its seemingly monumental ambitions, Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights has never been in danger of being weighed down by pretensions. From the opening minutes of Volume One, Gomes has maintained an effervescent tone, albeit one tamed somewhat in the darker Volume Two. Even there, Arabian Nights keeps its focus on its main subject: the Portuguese people, and the ways in which they’ve felt the impact of austerity. As such, Gomes’s film always true to itself and never seems to stray from the director’s vision.

Those coming to The Assassin, the new wuxia from Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien (winner of the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival), expecting an all-out action martial arts fest are in for a bit of a rude surprise. There certainly is action, and it carries considerable weight in the story. But rather than glorify the violence, the weight serves to magnify its importance and emphasize its effect upon those involved.

Movies about gaggles of sinister children scurrying about getting up to all kinds of bloody mischief (or alternately, standing stock still, staring into the middle distance and looking creepy) are nothing particularly new to horror films. Movies like The Innocents, Children of the Corn, Children of the Damned and countless others have all found success in gleefully twisting the popular image of children as innocent and harmless and capitalizing on that subtle unease felt by so many people in the presence of the young. It’s an ever-growing horror sub-genre, and once which Bruce McDonald’s Hellions aims to stake a claim in.