Revisit: In the Mouth of Madness
Though he had already dabbled in cosmic horror with his masterpiece The Thing, John Carpenter never looked on paper like the right fit for making films in the vein of horror legend H.P. Lovecraft. At...
View ArticleBetter Start Running
It’s been a decade since director Brett Simon gave us the weirdly cynical, yet highly enjoyable, high school comedy Assassination of a High School President. While that film’s bleak humor and limited...
View ArticleBigger
Titling a movie Bigger takes the kind of confidence that doesn’t consider failure. Director George Gallo and his creative team undoubtedly had other, more dynamic options for their biopic about Joe...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Shakespeare in Love Turns 20
Shakespeare in Love remains a strangely controversial film, despite (if not largely because of) its massive success at the 71st Academy Awards. No, its legacy isn’t akin to the likes of The Birth of a...
View ArticleGalveston
It’s strange that Mélanie Laurent’s second feature directorial effort would come from such painfully masculine source material. Not because a female filmmaker can’t do macho on screen, but because...
View ArticleOeuvre: Weerasethakul: Syndromes and a Century
After Tropical Malady radically elevated Apichatpong Weerasethakul to the forefront of millennial art directors, Syndromes and a Century doubled down on that film’s sense of simultaneous naturalism and...
View ArticleHalloween
In the 40 years since John Carpenter’s Halloween, there have been nine other films that attempted to continue, restart or re-imagine the success of the original. Those attempts run the gamut from good...
View ArticleWildlife
Paul Dano’s bravura directorial debut Wildlife will never straddle the zeitgeist like Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born. For one, Dano’s career as an actor—which includes roles in Little Miss Sunshine...
View ArticleRevisit: Reality Bites
A quarter century after its release, Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites fails to be a particularly good romantic comedy, but it is an absolutely indispensable time capsule. On the one hand, it’s funny...
View ArticleThe Guilty
The Guilty begins with a wry fake-out that says everything about the mood of Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), a policeman demoted to emergency dispatch for an unknown transgression. Gustav Möller opens...
View ArticleCaniba
Issei Sagawa likes Renoir and Disney. He also likes white women with fleshy buttocks—in particular to eat. In 1981, Sagawa killed and partially ate his friend Renée Hartevelt. Caniba, an intimate...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Chopping Mall
Stumble across Chopping Mall while scrolling through the glut of streaming B-movies and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a typical ‘80s slasher flick. The implication of the slice-and-dice title...
View ArticleBorder
Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, the Swedish film Border is a savvy mixture of social realism, supernatural horror and melodrama. It’s a psychological thriller...
View ArticleOeuvre: Weerasethakul: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
There is a moment more than midway through Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s paean to rural northern Thailand – where the viewer may realize (“may” because this...
View ArticleThe Dark
Slow-moving but consistently intriguing, The Dark is a fully-formed, dark fairy tale that balances its unvarnished portrayals of child abuse with a hefty serving of something lacking from genre fare as...
View ArticleBurning
At the center of its broken heart, the psychological thriller Burning is a mesmerizing character study of modern loneliness. Director Lee Chang-dong (Poetry) and his pitch-perfect leads navigate an...
View ArticleMonrovia, Indiana
One of the more frustrating consequences of the 2016 Presidential election is an obsessive national hand-wringing on the part of so-called “coastal elites” to understand so-called “Red State America.”...
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Revisit: Dead Man
Under the portentous strum of Neil Young’s electric guitar, a stranger wanders through an alien landscape. It is a place of violence, a land in transition where ruthless capitalists destroy pristine...
View ArticleUnlovable
Ever since invisible spiders crawled all over a detoxing Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, addiction narratives have been difficult to credibly execute. Addiction seems like such a...
View ArticleHoly Hell! Flowers of Shanghai Turns 20
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s filmography is, broadly speaking, an achronological overview of Taiwan’s history from its conquest by China through various periods of conquest and occupation to its nebulous present...
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