Take Me
In Take Me, the comic noir by actor/director Pat Healy, Ray Moody is a man frozen in time. He carries a flip phone, his laptop is bulky, his website might have cut an edge in 1997 but is now dull and...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Zombie (1979)
A cursory scroll through Netflix’s horror offerings will tell you that the world of streaming fright flicks is a mixed bag. Even good scary movies tend to divide viewers, so going off audience ratings...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: 10 On Ten
As a companion piece to 2002’s Ten, Abbas Kiarostami’s documentary 10 On Ten is an invaluable look into the filmmaker’s process. But as a standalone project exploring the nuts and bolts of cinematic...
View ArticleSnatched
Though Jonathan Levine’s new comedy Snatched tries its hardest, it’s impossible to completely mess up when you have two stars as naturally, magnetically watchable as Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer....
View ArticleKing Arthur: Legend of the Sword
Hollywood’s wheel of rebootable public domain IP once again lands on Arthurian legend, only this time, divisive Brit trash-auteur Guy Ritchie is at the helm. Without seeing a trailer, it wouldn’t be...
View ArticleHounds of Love
An Australian thriller set in late ‘80s Perth Hounds of Love checks off all the boxes as a genre piece: sadistic serial killer, torturous captivity scenes, incompetent police, ugly period cars and...
View Article3 Generations
At one point, 3 Generations was titled About Ray, named after its ostensible lead, a teenage trans boy played by Elle Fanning. The film’s millennial baiting marketing wants to present itself as an...
View ArticleViolet
The spirit of Gus Van Sant hangs over Violet, Belgian director Bas Devos’s feature debut. Its opening shot is a tour de force of aesthetically compounded isolation, a shot that pulls back from a hazy,...
View ArticleRediscover: The Headless Woman
The Headless Woman (2008) is a rigorous, disorienting film. It is meant to be watched over and over again and surely yields new insights with each subsequent viewing. The camerawork and script are...
View ArticleDead Awake
Sleep paralysis is fertile ground for horror: sufferers reportedly awake unable to move, their minds conscious but their bodies still frozen in place with sleep. Some people even report the feeling of...
View ArticleStefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
It’s hard to imagine how once-popular authors fade from collective memory. But it’s just as hard to imagine a political expat from Third Reich Germany ignoring the plight of other Jewish authors...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Jackie Brown Turns 20
It didn’t take long for Pulp Fiction to graduate from being just another great movie to its own category, a shorthand for critics and audiences alike to use when describing other, lesser things. It...
View ArticleOeuvre: Kiarostami: Shirin
The cinema of Abbas Kiarostami is decidedly experimental, but with the exception of non-narrative pieces as Five (2003), most of the Iranian master’s films experiment within the general conventions of...
View ArticleAlien: Covenant
Oh, Ridley Scott. You always sucker me in with your promising premises and fanboy milieus, whether it be an alien world, ancient Rome or war-torn Somalia. Yet, each and every time I walk out of the...
View ArticleEverything, Everything
Based on the Nicola Yoon young adult novel of the same name, Everything, Everything is a sweet, if unsatisfying, coming of age film. It’s entertaining and engrossing without being too saccharine, but...
View ArticleWakefield
Lester Burnham comes to mind when considering the antisocial response to upper-middle class ennui at the heart of Wakefield. In the criminally overrated American Beauty, Kevin Spacey’s character...
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Revisit: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
Dreams, those primal notions and stories that come unasked during the night, have long fascinated filmmakers and storytellers. My three-year-old son recently began remembering his dreams, claiming each...
View ArticleAfterimage
Andrzej Wajda’s final film, Afterimage, fits snugly within a canon devoted to the tumultuous history of Poland as seen through the eyes of significant figures. Here, that figure is Władysław...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: The International
The International is different from its post-9/11 political thriller peers. Director Tom Tykwer certainly embraces many of the excesses of the genre: convoluted plot machinations; the pathological need...
View ArticleBaywatch
Perhaps the greatest surprise that Baywatch offers is that, despite its R-rating, the only nudity in this adaptation of a TV show notorious for bouncing female beach bodies involves a corpse’s penis....
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