The Minute You Wake Up Dead
The Minute You Wake Up Dead seems to have been structured entirely on the basis of its supposedly indelible twists. There are basically three of them in director Michael Mailer and Timothy Holland’s...
View ArticleThe Novelist’s Film
Junhee would like to smoke her cigarette on the roof even though there is no smoking allowed. She swears it’s only an e-cigarette, though, and she’s desperately in need of a nicotine hit because the...
View ArticleNocebo
The Innocents, The Omen, Friedkin’s The Guardian that started production as purely grounded thrills and ended as tree-demon-druid-babysitter terror, all of M. Night Shyamalan‘s series Servant: eerie...
View ArticleUtama
In the final scene of Sohrab Shahid Saless’ 1974 masterpiece Still Life, an old man and his wife reluctantly leave the tiny, barren house they’ve shared for the better part of their lives, here they...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Spider Turns 20
It’s a sweeping generalization to say that the 1990s was a curious era for Western culture, but the closer the inspection, the stronger that statement seems to become. As a century of momentous change...
View ArticleThe Estate
Dean Craig’s latest film, The Estate revolves around two sisters, Macey (Toni Collette) and Savanna (Anna Faris), who own a failing restaurant that is in danger of closing if they don’t come up with...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: Cape Fear
Martin Scorsese’s 1991 film Cape Fear, a remake of the 1962 film starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum adapted from by John D. MacDonald‘s 1957 novel The Executioners, is one of the director’s...
View ArticleBlack Panther: Wakanda Forever
Given that Marvel films are predicated on their star power, Ryan Coogler had a tough proposition on his hands in forging onward with the Black Panther series. After Chadwick Boseman tragically lost his...
View ArticleThe Friendship Game
Sometimes movies are so bad that they’re good. Whether it’s because of a befuddling plot or laughable acting, these films find their strength in their inability to get things right. Unfortunately for...
View ArticleA Couple
Frederick Wiseman is arguably the most important nonfiction documentary filmmaker currently still alive. At age 92, he has shown no signs of being any less prolific, opting for a cinéma vérité style...
View ArticleBar Fight!
Bar Fight! essentially amounts to an 80-minute sitcom with a bunch of four-letter words that definitely would not have been allowed on television during a certain peak of the storytelling format....
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Revisit: Malcolm X
Despite the heavy controversy that swirled around its 1992 release, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X has by now established itself as a bulwark of the biopic genre: a stately, gravitas-streaked portrait of a...
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Demon Fuzz: Afreaka!
Some bands seem only to have existed to provide future generations with cool samples. So it is with UK-based band Demon Fuzz, often classified as Afro-rock, who existed for a few years from 1968 into...
View ArticleThe Great Basin
Politicians on both sides of the aisle exploit the cultural divide between urban and rural citizens by alternately painting the latter as either “real Americans” or uninformed obstacles to progress....
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Jennifer’s Body
The 2009 film Jennifer’s Body opens with a fairly straightforward thesis statement: “Hell is a teenage girl.” The film was made by a team of women, led in particular by director Karyn Kusama and writer...
View ArticleBad Axe
What is the American Dream? For the father of the Siev family, it’s reaching the United States and escaping the mass killings in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. More specifically, it’s Bad Axe, Michigan,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Scorsese: The Age of Innocence
When glancing at Scorsese’s enormous oeuvre, 1993’s The Age of Innocence certainly looks like an outlier hidden among the De Niro-starring crime/action thrillers Cape Fear, Goodfellas and Casino. The...
View ArticleThe Menu
It is amazing that chefs do not regard their customers with more contempt. Between accommodating the endless need for substitutions and sending food back, to say nothing of garden-variety rudeness,...
View ArticleEO
EO is somehow not the first nor the second film of the last few years that attempts to put the (likely human) viewer inside the mind of a farm animal, but it’s certainly the weirdest. In 2020, there...
View ArticleShe Said
She Said, the new journalism procedural from director Maria Schrader, takes the Spotlight approach and applies it to the bombshell New York Times story about Harvey Weinstein’s crimes. Like Spotlight,...
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