https://vo.rs/tags/philip-ridley/Latest from the Philip Ridley desk at vo.rs.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/screen/the-reflecting-skin-the-prairie-gothic-nobody-saw/<p>Some films are cursed by being too beautiful for their own subject. Philip Ridley&rsquo;s <em>The Reflecting Skin</em>, made in 1990 as the debut feature of a man better known then as a painter and playwright, is one of them. It is set in the American Midwest in the 1950s, in a country of golden wheat that runs flat to the horizon under a sky of enormous blue, and it is one of the most punishing films about childhood ever put on screen. The prettiness is the trap. Ridley photographs a genuinely horrible story in the palette of a nostalgia advert, and the collision is the point.</p>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:00:00 +0000