Anatomy of Time

I can still remember the waves caused by Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi.” He was a part of a new school of DIY filmmakers in the ’90s who truly changed the movie scene. With other filmmakers like Richard Linklater (with “Slacker”) and Kevin Smith (with “Clerks”), Rodriguez made the idea that anyone could be the next notable director seem real. It was a wave that would eventually create household names like Quentin Tarantino and gave birth to a career in Rodriguez that has consistently produced for the last two decades…

A famed author and noted skeptic attempts to debunk a haunting at a prestigious London prep school, and encounters a supernatural force that seems beyond human comprehension in director Nick Murphy's creepy gothic chiller. England, 1921: As the high cost of war takes a heavy toll on the national psyche, many people turn to spiritualism and the supernatural for reassurance that something better awaits us in the beyond. But Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) isn't buying it. A noted academic, Florence favors logic over fantasy, and she's built her career on proving that ghosts don't exist. Meanwhile, at Rockwood Boarding School, the recent death of a young boy has parents uneasy, and students convinced that the boy still wanders their hallowed halls in spectral form. Summoned to Rockwood by Headmaster Robert Mallory (Dominic West), Florence becomes more determined than ever before to reveal the haunting as a hoax.

Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, a meditation on depression and the end of the world, stars Kirsten Dunst as an emotionally troubled newlywed named Justine, whose sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) throws her a lavish wedding party. While her lack of emotional stability begins to take a toll on Justine's new marriage as well as the party – and old wounds are exposed – Claire's wealthy husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) also knows a great deal about a planet that is on a possible collision course with Earth, further muddying the waters. The second half of the movie focuses on Claire, who ends up taking her sister in after the marriage collapses, and also begins to fear that John is hiding apocalyptically bad news. John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling co-star. Melancholia screened at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.