78th Golden Globe Awards

Three women. Three settings.

Nearly half a century since The Exorcist won four Golden Globe awards, including Best Director and Best Motion Picture - Drama, and then also went on to became the first horror movie nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, the horror genre still has a certain “black sheep” reputation in too many cinema circles. It’s been embraced and explored by undeniable auteurs, from Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski to Stanley Kubrick and Darren Aronofsky, but too many critics have a reductive view of the genre’s narrative trappings, often seeing only literalism rather than, in its most interesting presentations, a way to metaphorically explore both innate human fears as well as various problems and issues informing societal unease.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a Best Picture Golden Globe and Oscar winner in 1976, made such an indelible impression on viewers that for decades since its release, it has colored an audience’s view of both mental institutions and movies that take place within them. Based on a true story, A State of Madness slowly and subtly upends some of those expectations, using its setting as a means by which to explore the larger moral rot of the system that surrounds it.

Based on by Luke Mogelson’s 2017 New Yorker article “The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISIS”, Mosul is a true to life action movie about a renegade Iraqi police SWAT team who disobey orders. They push fiercely against ISIS guerrilla street fights in order to save what’s left of their beloved home city of Mosul, in Northern Iraq.

Like so many foreign films this year, Canción Sin Nombre (the original title of this film) is a debut feature by a female director. Peruvian filmmaker Melina León chose a painful subject from her country’s history: in the late 1980s, Peru was a hotbed of politically motivated violence, its society in turmoil, with no oversight of its institutions, a corrupt and outdated legal system, a wealth gap of epic proportions and an outlook stuck in the dark ages when it came to women’s rights – and that’s not even taking into consideration the racist government policies affecting the indigenous part of its population.

Your Iron Lady tells the story of Teresa, played by a great Victoria del Rosal, a single mother navigating her recent move to the United States to escape a 22-year abusive marriage in Mexico. With one adult child still in Mexico and three living with her, Teresa struggles to make a new life for her family in Los Angeles.

A murder mystery set in 1955 Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the administration of President Peron, when different political forces were trying to overthrow his government. Mariano Turek and Lujan Loioco's About a Woman (Algo con una mujer) is a whodunit in which the detective is curiously a housewife, Rosa, played by Maria Soldi, a skillful seamstress who becomes the only witness of a murder.

Duque (Fernando Cayo) is a tireless detective who will not stop until his career ends. Angel (Miguel Herrán) is a marginalized young criminal who lives outside the law and outside the system, he will stop at nothing and pay any price to scale the social ladder and join the ranks of the capitalist elite from which he feels excluded.

Screenwriters, often the unsung heroes in cinema, get the spotlight for a change in Crisanto B. Aquino’s feature directing debut, Write About Love.

From My Dinner with Andre to Oleanna to Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, cinema has a rich tradition of so-called “two-handers” – movies that tightly focus on, and channel their drama primarily through, the examination of a single relationship between two people. Tawfik Baba’s Oliver Black generally fits this mold, telling the story of a nameless old man (Hassan Richiou) and a young African boy, Vendredi (Modou Mbow), wandering the desert of Morocco together.