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Revisit: Polyester
Why is an artist considered a sell-out once they receive the backing of a major studio? R.E.M. fans made these sorts of claims when the band hopped from I.R.S. Records to Warner Bros. while fans of...
View ArticleHammer
Character actor Will Patton has knocked every part he’s ever played out of the park, no matter how small those roles have been. Whether you know his name or just his face, a supercut reel of his finest...
View ArticleJudy & Punch
It isn’t a spoiler to reveal that the closing credits to the enchanting Judy & Punch include footage of children watching puppet shows in rapt astonishment. The title itself hints that the story is...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Girl Next Door
Studio comedies in the early years of the 2000s seemed to be in a state of flux. The Farrelly brothers had already peaked in their career during the back half of the 1990s, and it would be until the...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: The Phantom of the Opera
Dario Argento’s take on The Phantom of the Opera begins not unlike Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, with an unwanted baby thrust into the sewers to join the rest of a city’s refuse and excrement. And just...
View ArticleThe King of Staten Island
At this point we know what to expect from a Judd Apatow film: a bittersweet, overlong comedy about a protagonist with arrested development who eventually figures out a way to come into his or her own...
View ArticleReturn to Hardwick
There is certainly a very real wave of ‘40s nostalgia percolating in the rotten underbelly of 2020 so far. One instance of this is the President of the United States’ tone-deaf diatribes concocting...
View ArticleAviva
There’s a scene in All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s 1979 autobiographical stroll down auteur boulevard, where Roy Scheider’s Fosse stand-in Joe Gideon offers a room full of weary investors a look at the...
View ArticleInfamous
The classic crime film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) still feels shocking to this day. In the final scene (spoiler!), the anti-heroes perish in a hail of machine gun fire that feels like it bursts out of the...
View ArticleRediscover: Drop Dead Fred
Drop Dead Fred effectively shows us what imaginary friends represent to children. Importantly, screenwriters Carlos Davis and Anthony Fingleton tell such a story within the context of the “child” in...
View ArticleSometimes Always Never
Sometimes Always Never begins with a besuited Alan Miller (Bill Nighy) standing in a parking lot and facing the beach. He is on the phone with his son Peter (Sam Riley), explaining his location so they...
View ArticleMr. Topaze
The name Peter Sellers is likely to conjure any number of images for the cinephile, such as the lunatic, titular nuclear enthusiast in Dr. Strangelove desperately trying not to giggle while ad-libbing...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Suburban Commando
Everybody needs a vacation sometimes—even intergalactic mercenaries like Shep Ramsey (Hulk Hogan) in Suburban Commando. To call this interstellar 1991 comedy low-budget would do an incredible...
View ArticleRunner
While the idea of American exceptionalism is generally dunderheaded nonsense, in one arena of international relations at least, the United States for most of the post-WWII period could claim genuine...
View ArticleOeuvre: Argento: Sleepless
Despite a few successful modern riffs on its foundational themes, giallo is largely a relic of the past, as visually tied to gaudy ‘70s signifiers, questionable fashion choices and post-’60s malaise as...
View ArticleBabyteeth
Early on in this charming and unexpectedly dark tale of young love and questionable choices, a single look seals the fate of the naive schoolgirl protagonist when she glimpses the haunted eyes of the...
View ArticleI Am Vengeance: Retaliation
Here’s a sequel nobody asked for to a movie that no one saw. The 2018 release I Am Vengeance was a negligible action movie that once dominated the theatrical market. You know the kind: They usually...
View ArticleCrazy World
Originally shot in 2014, Nabwana I.G.G.’s Crazy World has belatedly been subtitled and released internationally on the back of increasing interest in the director’s film studio Wakaliwood. Based out of...
View ArticleStarDog and TurboCat
In its caliber of animation and storytelling, StarDog and TurboCat is vaguely tolerable at best. The only way to deal with this movie, really, is to damn it with the faint praise it earns by, well,...
View ArticleThe Soul Collector
One of the countries where discussions of race could be as fraught as they are here in America is South Africa, so it’s odd that The Soul Collector, a haunted house/monster movie mashup set in that...
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