Splice Is An Appropriately Unnerving Creature Feature

For the weekend of June 4, 2010, you had a couple of options in terms of new release movies. You could watch Killers, a Katherine Heigl/Ashton Kutcher romantic-comedy. You could also partake in Marmaduke, the newest attempt by Hollywood to make that Alvin and the Chipmunks lightning strike twice. Then there was Get Him to the Greek, starring Russell Brand (man, the movie stars of 2010 are such distant memories they might as well be the movie stars of 1920). Or you could watch Splice, an original horror film from Vincenzo Natali that goes in some...let's say strange directions. It's certainly not an ordinary film but I found it consistently engaging, even if only on a "What will they do next?" level.

Winter's Bone Propelled Jennifer Lawrence To Stardom And For Good Reason

Let's go back in time to 2010. It's the start of another decade. The iPad is the newest gizmo from the mind of apple. Kate Gosselin is trying to make Kate Plus Eight a thing. The House That Built Me is dominating the Billboard Country Music charts. And in June 2010, Winter's Bone got released to widespread acclaim and in the process, launched the career of one Jennifer Lawrence. Only the fourth movie she ever appeared in, Winter's Bone immediately propelled Lawrence onto the pop culture radar and her place on that radar would be cemented in the years to come with major hits like The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook.

Dogtooth Is Weird, Warped And Well-Made. In Other Words, It's A Yorgos Lanthimos Movie.

Though he had directed two feature-length motion pictures before it, Dogtooth was the movie that really put Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on the map thanks to its widespread acclaim and a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. The same kind of rampant dark humor, understated line deliveries and grim tone that permeates the man's later directorial efforts like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer are around in Dogtooth in abundance. In fact, Dogtooth feels very much like a precursor to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, not just in how it focuses on a family unit but also in how it feels like Lanthimos constantly dancing on the razor's edge of just how far he can push his actors and viewers with all the warped scenarios he puts them through.