Censor Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Here we are again — another year that somehow felt both five seconds and twelve eons long has come to a close. For me, a big highlight was definitely getting to see movies in theaters again (post-vaccination and with a mask on, of course).

We celebrate the movies at this time of year, and in the wild rush to praise directors and actors for all that nifty directing and acting they did over the last 365 days, we all tend to forget that cinema is about more than just two sets of people. Just read Twitter.

Let it be known that this was a particularly fascinating year for horror. As always, we saw our fair share of low-budget and arthouse horror titles, but 2021 was also a year where horror went mainstream in several unexpected places.

Look, thanks to that godforsaken pandemic, which messed up the Oscars and the entire calendar year, it’s kind of hard to make the Best Films Of The Year, So Far feature because so many films were kind of released in 2020 — to qualify early for the Oscars — and or many were just released in a quiet limited release in December 2020.

You could make an argument that the psychological thriller genre has grown a bit stale over the years. What used to be an interesting place to showcase character studies about truly disturbing people has turned into fairly basic procedurals with very few surprises.

If the people censoring inappropriate images out of films are there to protect the people from unnecessary horrors, who protects those protectors? In the new ‘80s-set, blood-soaked thriller, “Censor,” the answer is clearly no one. But thankfully, for audiences at least, the descent into madness of one film censor after witnessing a particularly violent “video nasty” is quite the enjoyable, utterly disturbing affair.

Pandemic life may have been horror enough for most, and no, this isn’t some comment on Inauguration Day, but those of us who find comfort in giving ourselves the creeps have been in a bit of a drought.

Every year is a good year to stan female directors, but 2021 has cooked us up a real feast. Acting veterans like Rebecca Hall, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Robin Wright, and Halle Berry are finally claiming their director’s chairs on feature films, while arthouse icon Jane Campion is returning to hers after 12 years.

The fact there are even 72 selections for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival is something of a miracle. The fall festivals had the benefit of movies that mostly shot before the pandemic hit in March.