The Place of No Words
It isn’t quite clear at first how the father and son have come to this place, but it’s a landscape so lush that it simply cannot exist on earth. They encounter otherworldly threats and beasts of an...
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Rediscover: Antonio Gaudí
A striking black and white photo adorns the booklet inside the Criterion Collection release of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s documentary Antonio Gaudí (1984). Shot in Barcelona’s Parc Güell, the photo depicts...
View ArticleBad Hair
In the wake of Get Out’s success, Black horror has become enough of a mainstream commodity that Lionsgate let Chris Rock help reboot the Saw series. But so far, most of the films greenlit in this era...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Shadow of the Vampire Turns 20
Vampires have dominated cinematic imagination to the point that Count Dracula has appeared in more films than any other fictional character but Sherlock Holmes. He’d have made it into a few more if not...
View ArticleBorat Subsequent Moviefilm
Early into Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakhstani journalist once again finds himself wandering the streets of an American town’s central business district. Only this time, 14...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: Rabid
In many ways, Rabid feels like an alternative riff on the same sexualized body horror and plague paranoia of Shivers, this time working its way from the countryside to urban centers instead of vice...
View ArticleCome Play
It’s odd how, on paper, so many horror films don’t sound nearly as promising as they should. The Ring might be a contemporary horror classic for good reason, yet the idea of a VHS tape that summons a...
View ArticleMadre
The opening minutes of director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Madre are a marvel of quick-ratcheting tension, as a pleasant domestic scene in a sunny apartment transforms into a vice of emotional stress over the...
View ArticleThe True Adventures of Wolfboy
It would seem that everything about The True Adventures of Wolfboy pretty much falls into place, meaning that Olivia Dufault’s screenplay certainly wastes no time establishing its formula. A boy...
View ArticleRevisit: For a Few Dollars More
In the year of COVID and quarantine and election anxiety, it is nice to escape into the purely visceral pseudo-reality of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. The Dollars trilogy, and its second...
View ArticleFire Will Come
Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come unfolds in contested territory. Its Galician setting is home to the area’s long-time inhabitants (human and otherwise), creatures within whom the land pulses like blood....
View ArticleJungleland
There are a few film genres that are as American as apple pie and the tropes of films in these genres play into the same mythos as apple-pie-as-national-identity, too. Road movies and boxing movies are...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The Counselor
At the time of its release, Ridley Scott’s 2013 crime thriller The Counselor was crushed by the weight of lofty expectations. This was, after all, the first and only original screenplay penned by...
View ArticleAssholes: A Theory
The first several minutes of Assholes: A Theory, based on the book of the same title by Philosophy professor Aaron James, reveal a good narrative premise and a specific visual style. These are good...
View ArticleOeuvre: David Cronenberg: Fast Company
Sandwiched between two shlock horror extravaganzas and a decade full of even more boundary-pushing material, 1979’s Fast Company feels like a total one-off oddity in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre....
View ArticleMortal
After two decades ruled by blockbusters and masked avengers, the theatrical market turned 2020, thanks to COVID-19, into a year without big screen superheroes. André Øvredal’s Mortal might have been...
View Article18 to Party
A group of teens, circa 1984, gather outside a nightclub, waiting to get into a party to which they were not exactly invited and for which they would never have been given an invitation in the first...
View ArticleProxima
Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff, about the origins of NASA’s Mercury space program, set the high bar for docudrama depictions of astronaut training. As much about the frontiers of man’s...
View ArticleThe Dark and the Wicked
Writer-director Bryan Bertino commits to a specific tone in The Dark and the Wicked, a downbeat horror-thriller about a dying patriarch whose imminent mortality sets upon the surviving members of his...
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Revisit: Paris is Burning
With the election of Joe Biden as president, there is hope that many of Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-LGBTQ+ policies will be overturned and replaced with protections for queer citizens. For the past...
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