Atlantics Ain't Afraid of No Ghost...or Committing to Bold Storytelling & Cinematography Choices

In art, the act of falling in love with someone is connected with the notion of being alive. In the traditional language of cinema, being able to connect with another person is to reaffirm that you're indeed a living, breathing person. How ironic, then, that Atlantics would be a romantic-drama that would so heavily feature ghosts. Whether they come in the forms of Casper or entities the Ghostbusters would track down, ghosts are always depicted as the very opposite of love, and by proxy, the very opposite of the traditional cinematic depiction of romance. But writer/director Mati Diop works wonders in bringing together life and death for a one-of-a-kind romantic drama.

Slice Is A Classic Example of an Overstuffed Movie That Still Feels Empty

You'd be forgiven if you began watching Slice and presumed, thanks to the shockingly dense amount of mythology it throws at the viewer, that it was part of some larger franchise, perhaps it's a sequel to another movie or even just a feature-film adaptation of an Adult Swim show. In fact, this is a completely stand-alone motion picture hailing from writer/director Austin Vesley that just has a wider universe it needs to establish before its plot can get underway. Peculiarly though, a proper story or anything else similarly substantive never really materializes despite a whole horde of characters and supernatural tomfoolery getting introduced, Slice instead just has a lot of chess pieces in play that it never bothers to move around the board.