Running with the Devil
Though hardly the first drug network narrative, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, which captured the insoluble nature of the drug war by exposing how massively interconnected the underground economy really...
View ArticleCriminally Underrated: Inherent Vice
The internet loves lists, even though they are inherently fraught exercises. As much as we love a good online list, we most love getting to dismantle them with our critiques. It is no surprise, then,...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: Jacquot de Nantes
In Jane B. by Agnès V., Agnès Varda floated the idea of autobiography as filmed by another person, a collaborative project in which the content of a life is reinterpreted via an external point of view....
View ArticleThe Day Shall Come
If comedy truly flows from tension, Chris Morris’ The Day Shall Come seems perfectly positioned for hilarity, situated amid the thorny tangle of a host of hot-button issues. Gentrification, police...
View ArticleSister Aimee
Sister Aimee isn’t the first cinematic portrait of the famed Canadian-American Pentecostal evangelist Sister Aimee Elizabeth Semple McPherson, and it probably won’t be the last, considering how...
View ArticleThe Death of Dick Long
The best films allow us to sympathize with those who are unsympathizable. From Fritz Lang (M) to Todd Solondz (Happiness), directors have taken great risks by asking us to cozy up to despicable...
View ArticlePrey
What little prestige the Blumhouse umbrella brand has left gets taxed to the maximum in Prey, a straight-to-video thriller with a halfway decent premise and literally nothing else whatsoever. From the...
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Rediscover: Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
Rainer Werner Fassbinder isn’t known for his affection towards mankind. His best-loved films often feature a bleak ending for his protagonists. Yet, in Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, an eight-hour...
View Article10 Minutes Gone
Ten minutes into 10 Minutes Gone director Brian A. Miller’s love for Michael Mann’s gangster classic Heat becomes obvious. Once you realize that you begin to wonder why you’re not watching that movie...
View ArticleFrom the Vaults of Streaming Hell: The Ghost in the Darkness
In Stephen Hopkins’ 1996 thriller The Ghost and the Darkness, when Val Kilmer’s John Henry Patterson proclaims, “I will kill the lion, and I will build the bridge,” he’s met with the pithy rejoinder,...
View ArticleFirst Love
Takashi Miike long ago slipped past anything approaching genre constraints, and First Love is a testament to his ability to fuse disparate styles into a cohesive whole, or at least a whole that...
View ArticleOeuvre: Varda: The Young Girls Turn 25
To write about The Young Girls Turn 25 in 2019 as part of a long-running and exhaustive retrospective on the film oeuvre of Agnés Varda is to do precisely what that film was doing: celebrating a...
View ArticleJoker
For someone routinely bored and dismayed by cookie-cutter superhero films, Joker is a fresh breath of rotten air, a gutsy and realistic genesis story of one of the most beloved comic villains. Jack...
View ArticleMemory: The Origins of Alien
How does a perfect film get made? In most cases, we tend to think of perfect (or close) cinema as the result of the singular vision of a very talented filmmaker. But if Alexandre O. Philippe’s snappy,...
View ArticleRediscover: Fleshpot on 42nd Street
“Wilder than you can imagine!” “Explicit beyond belief!” Taglines for the 1973 grindhouse quickie Fleshpot on 42nd Street promise, like its title, a lurid hardcore porno. But actor Fred Lincoln, who...
View ArticleDilili in Paris
The latest work from legendary French animator Michel Ocelot, Dilili in Paris is an acquired taste. It’s not a Pixaresque whirlwind of visual delight and storytelling greatness. It doesn’t have the...
View ArticleLittle Monsters
Abe Forsythe’s Little Monsters makes it clear early on that its title has a double meaning. After all, it’s a film about a class full of kindergarteners trying to escape from a horde of zombies. But...
View ArticleWrinkles the Clown
Whenever clowns have a pop cultural moment, times can get tough for those select few who take the art of buffoonery seriously. Since the publication of Stephen King’s It, clowns have skewed more toward...
View ArticleCuck
With all the discourse surrounding the Joker movie and its relationship to incel culture and the prevalence of white rage in modern American culture, media critics seem to be willfully ignoring how...
View ArticleHoly Hell: The Mummy Turns 20
Has it really been 20 years since Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy shambled across our screens? Less a remake of Karl Freund’s 1932 Universal Monsters classic and more a dumbed-down, unauthorized spin on an...
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