“Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000

With its clinical, anonymous interiors, its icily sardonic manner and its vision of a profoundly disordered human future in which celebrity worship merges with cutting-edge biotechnology, the Canadian horror-thriller “Antiviral” would remind viewers of David Cronenberg’s early films no matter who had directed it. But since it’s the debut feature from writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, the comparison immediately gets complicated. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s ingenious or foolhardy of the younger Cronenberg to go right at his dad’s legacy this way – quite likely it’s both. At any rate, he’s created an interesting decoding problem for viewers, along with an intriguing low-budget chiller that deserves to be seen on its own terms.

David Cronenberg: How I seduced Rob Pattinson

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Whatever you make of the twists and turns of David Cronenberg’s career, which now encompasses 18 feature films going back to 1975, including such disruptive or subversive classics as "Crash," "Naked Lunch" and "A History of Violence," he has steadfastly refused to repeat himself. With “Cosmopolis,” his hypnotic, minimalist adaptation of Don DeLillo’s allegorical 2003 novel, whose only plot and action involve an ultra-rich currency trader driving across Manhattan in a stretch limo, Cronenberg once again forges into unexplored terrain. This dreamlike vision of a 1 percenter – or more like a one-tenth-of-1-percenter – facing moral, existential and financial meltdown is a flawed, strange and undeniably powerful creation, with a hallucinatory and apocalyptic undertow that DeLillo’s novel (to my taste) mostly lacks.

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“Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg

David Cronenberg: How I seduced Rob Pattinson