Welcome to The Penny-Pinching Cinephile, a weekly spotlight of the best free flicks on the web. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta eat.
1.) Peppermint Candy
The second film from internationally acclaimed Korean director Lee Chang-Dong, Peppermint Candy begins with the main character’s suicide and tracks back through the episodes of his life to see how he came to that end. Divided into five time frames, each more heart-wrenching than the next, Peppermint Candy isn’t exactly a feel good film. It is, however, a great film–and one that gets better each time you watch it. Rightfully acclaimed for its backwards tracking structure and lead performance by Sol Kyung-gu, Lee’s film is an epic that feels like an intimate drama.
2.) Nosferatu
Arguably the first great monster movies, FW Murnau’s silent Nosferatu remains one of the scariest and best adaptations of the Dracula story ever made. Featuring groundbreaking cinematography and a creepily iconic performance from Max Schreck as Count Orlok, Nosferatu remains a startling, unsettling horror film more than ninety years after it premiered.
3.) Repulsion
Roman Polanski’s psychological thriller is a classic of the genre and one of the most unsettling, claustrophobic nightmares ever put to film. It stars Catherine Deneuve as a beautiful but distant young woman whose mental repressions come to a head over several days where she literally traps herself in her apartment. Featuring intensely disturbing dream sequences, emphasized by the film’s stark black and white cinematography, Repulsion is sure to cause nightmares to the first-time viewer. This sense of acute paranoia is levied somewhat by Polanski’s penchant for morbid humor, which only serves to intensify the viewer’s ill ease.
The directorial debut of cult favorite Todd Solondz, Welcome to the Dollhouse is a uniquely disturbing black comedy set amongst the sheer terror of middle school in the American suburbs. Starring Heather Matarazzo as the unfortunately-named 12-year old Dawn Wiener, the film details the excruciatingly painful everyday occurrences of Dawn’s miserable existence. Bullied at school (the kids call her “Wiener dog”), ignored and unfairly punished at home (where her parents favor her cute, ballerina little sister), Dawn’s life seems like a never-ending nightmare of adolescent torture. The film never tries to alleviate Dawn’s suffering, favoring the more realistic approach of Dawn settling into her life of awkward discomfort.
5.) Jesus Camp
Scarier than any of the films I’ve already outlined this week is Jesus Camp, a documentary about an Evangelical youth ministry that indoctrinates its kids into radical, fundamentalist Christianity and politicizes five, six, and seven year olds into supporting George W. Bush. This is documentary filmmaking guaranteed to piss you off. The stunning footage of these children crying, shaking and speaking in tongues during worship is both terrifying and pitying. It’s hard not to feel sorry for these kids, all of whom have been forced into this fanatical frenzy by their parents and pastors; it’s the adults who are really to blame for the madness going on here. When you hear the main pastor favorably compare her kids to the children being trained abroad in radical Islam and offer them up as Christian sacrifices to the cause…well, I hope you have a pillow nearby to punch. You’ll need it.
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