High-Rise

Ever since he ditched his band Pop Will Eat Itself and shacked up with Darren Aronofsky, composer Clint Mansell has been an in-demand source of grandiose, haunting film scores. His partnership with Aronofsky would prove to be the most fruitful part of his career, yielding the accompaniments for Pi, Black Swan, Noah, The Fountain, The Wrestler, and Requiem for a Dream, from which his magnum opus “L

Last month, my home city of Washington, D.C. got a couple feet of snow and I spent three days holed up in my apartment. That brief 72-hour span alone nearly drove me to the brink of insanity, and so I suppose I get where the characters in the J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise are coming from. Their luxury apartment complex has sufficient amenities to make entering the outside world unnecessary, and so of course they all devolve into warlike tribes and turn on one another in an orgy of bourgeois social angling gone violent. A few days of snow nearly had me talking to cantaloupes with faces painted on them; life in a high-rise, even a fabulously posh one, would be more than enough to get me to eat my landlord‘s dog.

By now you’ve heard the buzz surrounding High-Rise, the new film from director Ben Wheatley, the deranged and brilliant mind behind films like Kill List, A Field in England and Sightseers. That buzz is well-earned for Wheatley’s latest, which is based on the novel by J.G. Ballard (Drive) and features an incredible lineup, including Tom Hiddleston, Elisabeth Moss, Luke Evans and more. A new trailer has arrived, offering a tantalizing and slightly unnerving glimpse inside the titular high-rise, and teasing the evolving (or devolving) psyche of the residents within.

Among the sequels and reboots and remakes and re-quels (a word I just made up, but will inevitably be real one day), one of 2016’s most hotly anticipated releases is Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel High-Rise. Wheatley impressed genre cultists with his highly idiosyncratic The Kill List and A Field in England, and so when he was able to secure a high-profile cast including Tom H

The first trailer for the film, released today, indicates that it’s only a matter of time until the rabid Tom Hiddleston fans and equally rabid J.G. Ballard fans get what they crave.

Ben Wheatley is in the process of signing a deal to remake the classic thriller The Wages of Fear for eOne. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot of Diabolique fame, the original 1953 film followed a quartet of doomed Europeans transporting two trucks full of nitroglycerine through the mountains to an exploding oil well in Mexico so that the flame can be extinguished.

Fantastic Fest is easily one of the best, most fun, most insane, and most booze-soaked film festivals in the world. Held every year at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, the festival created by Drafthouse owner Tim League is filled with genre film selections from all over the world, offering a unique experience and atmosphere. This year's fest includes highly-anticipated films like Green Room, High-Rise, The Martian, and The Witch, as well as smaller and equally exciting titles like The Devil's Candy, Demon, and Son of Saul.

Director Ben Wheatley and his screenwriting partner Amy Jump are known for their specific, darkly humorous sensibilities, from the horror thriller Kill List to the black and white psychedelic intensity of A Field in England, and the bleak hilarity of Sightseers. The duo return this year with High-Rise, based on J.G. Ballard’s sophisticated dystopian tale of class warfare in an elegant apartment block. It may be his most inaccessible and tonally ambitious film to date, but it also might be his best.