The Little Stranger
An icy chill hangs over every moment of The Little Stranger, a sophisticated period piece whose depiction of class upheaval in postwar England has the eerie and unsettling tone of a supernatural...
View ArticleLet the Corpses Tan
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan is ostensibly a Western, but is perhaps better categorized as a stunningly beautiful, yet distressingly empty, homage to grindhouse action films....
View ArticlePick of the Litter
Who’s a good movie? And so handsome! The documentary Pick of the Litter follows five puppies in the Guide Dogs for the Blind program from birth to career assignment. Do you really need any more...
View ArticleBlood Fest
The teens at the heart of Blood Fest inhabit a space in which popular slasher franchises from our world exist but self-aware horror comedies like Scream and The Cabin in the Woods evidently do not....
View ArticleHoly Hell! Out of Sight Turns 20
The space between two people is a fascinating thing to behold. At times, the air that separates a pair of bodies is filled with disdain, or anxiousness, or indifference—but in Steven Soderbergh’s Out...
View ArticleOeuvre: Brooks: Dracula: Dead and Loving It
No matter how you slice it, Dracula: Dead and Loving It is an embarrassingly poor end to Mel Brooks’ legendary directing career. Whether viewed as a spoof of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its myriad film...
View ArticlePeppermint
Usually, seeing a director like Pierre Morel (who helmed the original Taken) attached to a boilerplate revenge film means that, regardless of substance, it should at the very least be a fun ride. But...
View ArticleThe Nun
The Nun, Corin Hardy’s standalone horror film/prequel to The Conjuring 2/sequel-and-also-prequel to Annabelle: Creation is an often-striking chiller that nonetheless stretches the limits of what a...
View ArticleBlaze
Movies about musicians often operate in a mode similar to those about outlaws, centering around magnetic but otherwise antisocial figures, whose casual flouting of custom and convention serves to...
View ArticleCold Skin
On its surface, Cold Skin takes the Man Versus Nature narrative conflict to an extreme, as a young weather researcher at a remote island outpost discovers that surviving his yearlong assignment will...
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Revisit: Tree of Life
In the 1950s, a family plants a sapling in the front yard of their Texas home. “You’ll be grown before this tree is tall,” the beautiful red-headed mother (Jessica Chastain) tells her small boy, Jack....
View ArticleHal
Hal, a warm and thoughtful documentary about the eponymous New Hollywood director Hal Ashby, is bookended by scenes that take place in a darkened editing bay, an apropos setting for a filmmaker who...
View ArticleMara
There are several overlapping sub-genres within the broader category of horror films: supernatural, psychological, slasher, gore-fest, monster and on and on. Every horror fan would probably compose her...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Pottersville
There’s no shortage of schmaltzy holiday family films on streaming platforms like Netflix, but so many of those movies are copy-and-paste affairs. They’re fewer actual movies and more crude assemblages...
View ArticleThe Predator
Can a movie both proclaim that people on the autism spectrum are perhaps the next step on the evolutionary ladder and then make jokes about “ass burgers”? In Shane Black’s hyper-aware, yet...
View ArticleMandy
With his second film, Paddy Cosmatos confirms himself to be a modern master of the color filter. Vaguely harking back to some feverishly imagined era of new-wave giallo, Mandy is established with...
View ArticleMDMA
In spite of the sudden spike in nostalgia for the decade in popular culture, the ‘80s still represent that period during which we, as a species, accelerated our descent into the dystopian abyss of...
View ArticleDon’t Leave Home
An atmosphere of creeping dread can work wonders for horror, but rarely can tone carry a film on its own. Writer-director Michael Tully’s ambitious yet ultimately underwhelming supernatural thriller...
View ArticleRevisit: Nighthawks
Despite its flawed script and troubled production history, the 1981 crime drama Nighthawks is a thoroughly entertaining product of what now seems a more innocent time; when a 15-million dollar...
View ArticleGarry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable
Street photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) was an unusually physical shutterbug; he was known to run across the street, ignoring traffic just to line up a promising shot. He would jockey into...
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