10 . Hounds of Love Putting a rugged twist on the serial-killer subgenre, Australian director Ben Young's stellar debut concerns a young girl in 1987 Perth named Vicki (Ashleigh Cumming) who, after another row with her mother about her parents' separation. is lured back to the home of a couple (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry) that, it turns out, has deviant plans for her. From an opening POV pan across a schoolyard populated by nubile teenage girls to the many shots in which Young's camera pulls back from closed façades, Hounds of Love conveys a chilling sense of unspeakable horrors being perpetrated just out of everyday view—thus lending the proceedings a faux-based-on-real-events grittiness and immediacy. As it slowly elucidates the parent-child issues plaguing both its captors and their captive, the film develops into a chilling portrait of male domination and female liberation, all while providing, at every turn, an almost unbearable amount of methodica...
Frank Sinatra Has A Cold And Other Essays, by Gay Talese It’s 1966, and a fading legend stands in the foggy gloom of a Beverly Hills bar, clouded by cigarette smoke and ego, nursing a drink and a common cold. From its beginning, Gay Talese’s profile of Old Blue Eyes is precise, elegant and endearing, without a whiff of press release plagiarism. This collection from the godfather of New Journalism is a bedside table fixture, to be returned to again and again. (Holly Bruce) ...