Schrader translates his and his brother's own oppressive, abusive "Jesus freaks and candy asses" Midwest Calvinist upbringing to Russell Banks' pure dose of freezing cold, New Hampshire murder mystery as it slowly unfurls itself into a teeth-pullingly miserable familial melodrama. Has such a strange downbeat, funeral mood, and a very deliberately muted, snowy look that compliments the haunted, foggy-memory slow-burn editing structure and makes this feel like it's clumsily digging into and reopening festered generational wounds with a sense of lonely detachment. 

Eventually building to a genuinely frightening gut punch of an ending, and one of the bleakest visions of the poisonous patriarch inheritance cycle I've maybe ever seen. The big Tarkovsky shot! James Coburn and Nick Nolte are so…

I frankly realize that Affliction will never be mentioned in the ongoing conversation concerning the ‘greatest films ever’—which, when you consider that I rank it higher than both 2001 and Seven Samurai, only makes this five-star rating completely ridiculous—but I’ll continue to champion it as one of the bleakest, most harrowing domestic dramas—and yes, one of the greatest films—of all time. a bold claim? If it is, then just ignore me.

Paul Schrader’s televisual directing style has proved time and time again to be his undoing as a filmmaker, but here, that’s not the case. The man is no formalist, and has always seemed more comfortable as just a screenwriter, but Affliction's lack of visual flair feels appropriate. Opting to…

The violence in the hearts of men never really fades. It freezes into their being like a permafrost that thaws only with an explosive blast of fire and fury. 

Paul Schrader’s 1997 film “Affliction” is one of the director’s most structurally ambitious films, and a true acting showcase for its male leads. It is also, as its director once claimed in an interview, outside his usual wheelhouse, with its themes of inherited familial trauma. While perhaps not a topic explicit in Schrader’s preceding work, it is a subject with which he has implicitly alluded to in personal familiarity. And while in the director’s prior entries, the concept usually surfaced as a form of generational societal angst, here - it is…

cyclical nature of trauma and violence in relation to masculinity made mythical almost, this feels like a distanced tale from another world, every action and reaction slowly being lost to time as new traumas and new violence arises in its place. have no idea where the hell to even start on this, dafoe's narration gives it this almost relaxing edge, his vocals soothe while the images attack, his distance and reflection makes the film tragic and haunting in ways i'm not sure i can relay. nolte's never been better, sure his rage and outbursts of alcohol fuelled carnage are as good as you'd expect from a man who looks genetically primed to eat you, but the heartbreak and pain within…

Paul Schrader is a name many know, but like me, few are familiar with his filmography as a director. I know some of the more popular ones, but films like this one I wouldn't have known about if it weren't for LB's Nakul.

And in many ways, it can be described as a less action-packed, much more psychological character study version of films like "Falling Down". It's basically about a small-town sheriff investigating a case involving a supposed hunting accident, while dealing with a series of tragedies and family traumas that eventually lead him to lose his sanity, culminating in an unexpected yet cathartic ending.

Nolte is superb, bringing to life a character whose rage is palpable from the beginning,…

“Our stories, Wade's and mine, describe the lives of the boys and men for thousands of years: boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth, men whose best hope for connection with other human beings lay in detachment, as if life were over.”

Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte) is unwell. His daughter hates him. His ex wife has long moved on. Many people don’t respect his role as a small town cop, including his boss. He drinks and smokes marijuana at work. His often drunk father Glen (James Coburn) is a black hole of a man, sucking the life out of everybody in his orbit for decades.  

When Wade suspects…