It’s hard not to think of predator drones while watching Robocop. Those sleek white fuselages cutting air, the breathless moment as missiles detach from long, stiff wings and streak toward a distant target. Hellfire. It’s an evocative name for something meant to collapse apartment buildings and incinerate wedding guests, and just as...
2022-02-06 21:55:10 +0000 UTC View Post
I’ll never understand the interest directors have in Bradley Cooper. He has neither the flinty, affected intensity of Cruise or Fiennes nor the bland likeability of Hanks. He has no physical presence, no sexual aura, no edge, no menace, and his voice is pure dishwater. He can carry a comedic role with his long face and large, bright eyes, but ...
2022-02-06 05:49:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Raw-boned and vulnerable with her gangly frame and large, wet eyes, Rebecca Hall more closely echoes Shelly Duvall than does any other actress of her generation. After fifteen years of tedious costume dramas and paint-by-numbers horror slop, David Bruckner’s frightening but uneven The Night House finally gives her a chance to prove sh...
2022-02-04 20:18:27 +0000 UTC View Post
The entirety of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth was shot on soundstages, and I mean it as a compliment when I say that you can really tell. Brutalist concrete parapets hang suspended in fields of swirling fog machine mist. Dark water floods a cold and sterile courtyard. Every frame of Coen’s film is calculated to disorient and al...
2022-02-01 03:09:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Here is a play: actors mill on a crowded stage while a crowd of nobles in the court of Cosimo de’ Medici III looks on, applauding and calling out responses to the players’ prompts. An aging, disease-stricken woman gives birth to a golden-haired babe (smuggled onstage under cover of cloaks and skirts) to break the curse of childlessness which...
2022-01-29 06:26:06 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s hard to make art about fictional art, especially when the fictional art in question is supposed to be good. The viewer has to believe that a novel that doesn’t exist could truly transport made-up people they’ve only known for minutes or hours. Think of the often-lambasted Cookbook from M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the W...
2022-01-29 01:34:41 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a scene in Michael Mann’s Thief that has nothing to do with heists or lone wolf bravado or organized crime, which has no relation to D quality emerald cut diamonds or high-powered acetylene torches. In it, professional thief Frank (James Caan) and diner cashier Jessie (Tuesday Weld) transition from arguing in a near-empty re...
2022-01-25 05:14:29 +0000 UTC View Post
How do you live when your whole world is rotting around you? It’s a question the red-hot surface of which we’ve all spent the last few years of our lives pressed up against, and it forms the dramatic core of Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's Aniara. Trapped aboard a colony ship after an accident during a routine Earth-to-Mars transit...
2022-01-23 06:39:17 +0000 UTC View Post
“I suppose you think me a vain old woman,” says the titular actress and movie star (Hildegard Knef) in the final moments of Billy Wilder’s Fedora. Her one-time suitor Barry Detweiler (William Holden) kisses her hand with melancholy respect before departing, but offers no opinion on the statement. She is, of course. Her vanity ate ...
2022-01-21 22:54:43 +0000 UTC View Post
I don’t know that there’s another movie which so perfectly captures the gut-churning feeling of knowing you’ve done something that would not just disappoint but crush a beloved teacher. Insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) walks around like he has a lead weight in his stomach after getting his head turned by a hundred grand and t...
2022-01-21 06:44:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Ace in the Hole, as so many of Wilder’s films do, begins with a man down on his luck and out on his ass. Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a reckless New York journalist with a long string of burned bridges behind him when he washes up at a small Albuquerque paper, hoping to latch onto a story big enough to propel him back to his career...
2022-01-20 04:40:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Repo Men contains somewhere within its biomass perhaps one fifth of a good movie, but much like the quick and dirty surgery its titular operatives perform to extract foreclosed-on artificial organs from the bodies of their victims, prying that fifth out isn’t much fun. The film’s uncomfortably close to reality satirical premise of a...
2022-01-18 20:24:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Were one to map film as a medium, Lynch’s Inland Empire might fall somewhere along the border between soap opera and found footage horror. Its shaky handheld camerawork and the raw, exposed visual quality of its digital footage makes it feel at times like a home movie shot by someone in the midst of a psychotic break, a narrative of t...
2022-01-18 17:45:10 +0000 UTC View Post
I can only assume Tom Hooper saw the 2003 The Cat in the Hat adaptation with Mike Myers and thought, “I can go lower.” Why else would a grown man spend millions conjuring up a creative vision which manages the stupendous feat of being both bizarre and tedious, except for sheer perversity of character? Whatever Hooper’s reasons, hi...
2022-01-05 20:34:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh dices its main players into kaleidoscopic fragments, employing a visual style reminiscent of comic paneling to convey action, romance, and suspense through partial images. Its iconic shot of a razor in a black-gloved hand set against the shadows of an empty parking garage. Its cutaways t...
2022-01-04 05:06:02 +0000 UTC View Post
Squid Game has a fascinating cinematic pedigree, evoking everything from SAW to Battle Royale to The Running Man as it spins its story of poverty, desperation, and dehumanizing cruelty. Anchored by the masterful performances of Lee Jung-jae, Anupam Tripathi, Park Hae-soo, HoYeon Jung, and O Yeong-su, the serie...
2021-12-29 04:54:28 +0000 UTC View Post
In her second feature film, animator Jonni Phillips creates a faintly Seussian alternate America in which an awkward and repressed young trans person — the titular Barber Westchester (Chris Kim) — struggles to come of age while dealing with cult conditioning, intense social, sexual, and religious anxiety, and the collapse of their own unders...
2021-12-29 01:45:08 +0000 UTC View Post
The act of having a cake and the act of eating said cake are, at an existential level, famously and fundamentally at odds. It’s a narrative dilemma which has plagued thirty years of blockbuster action franchises, saddling the entire enterprise with the overinflated tension of debating whether it’s going to be a safe retread or, at the risk o...
2021-12-28 01:40:34 +0000 UTC View PostManhattan, New York
1995
Shelby walked past Penn Station in the broiling August heat, hurrying so that no one would ask why she was crying. So that no one would look too close. She was sure her mothers had at least one PI sniffing around by now; they’d never go to the police, never do anything to risk their socialite friends findin...
2021-12-26 03:20:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey gang, I'm sure you've noticed I'm a few reviews behind with I Would Like to See It. I just wanted to touch base and let you all know I'm in the middle of a move as well as finishing my second novel, and to thank you for sticking with me through another crazy, draining year. You guys are the best readers anyone could ask for, and my plan is t...
2021-12-23 07:40:14 +0000 UTC View Post
While Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) hurled bags of gold bullion at Spider Man (Toby McGuire) after the latter, in his civilian life as Peter Parker, failed to help his elderly aunt May (Rosemary Harris) secure financial aid to help her pay her mortgage, I kept thinking of a quote from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace: “I know writers who...
2021-12-12 04:47:27 +0000 UTC View Post
After two decades of Disney’s formulaic corporate superhero sludge, going back to the movie you could argue started it all is an almost surreal experience. Sam Raimi’s Spider Man bears little resemblance to the movies it inspired, its gee-whiz earnestness and enthusiastic embrace of its comic book origins via double exposure, split ...
2021-12-12 01:34:45 +0000 UTC View Post
On a primal gut level, there’s very little as upsetting as the sound of a pig in distress. Not only is the high-pitched squeal they produce simultaneously infantile and abrasive, confusing our brains as to how to react, but the animal’s lung capacity far exceeds our own, enabling them to maintain a squeal for an agonizing length of time. Fab...
2021-12-11 01:05:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Every inch of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is made with such exquisite attention to detail that by the time the payload of unstable nitroglycerin around which the film’s plot revolves and from which it derives the lion’s share of its tension first appears, the consequences of its mishandling feel not just obvious but physically tan...
2021-12-10 19:08:30 +0000 UTC View Post
The Last Duel opens with two knights at tilt, lances lowered, horses thundering over frozen earth. It’s a tense image, and Scott shoots it as though we’re riding hard on the heels of Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), clearly conveying the bone-shattering force with which the two riders are about to converge. The next time we see this ...
2021-12-01 04:35:09 +0000 UTC View Post
House of Gucci isn’t an especially memorable film. It’s not offensive, either. Far from it! The movie hits its marks, gets in its little jokes, and then puts itself politely out to pasture after serving its audience a wafer-thin portion of emotional payoff. Its characters are like paper cutouts in a puppet show, every action clearly...
2021-11-25 06:45:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Arcane starts out like a hundred other shows aimed at older kids and teens. A plucky gang of orphans stumbles headfirst into a magical adventure. Old hands reminisce about the fights of their youths as fresh violence threatens. A hatchet-faced villain with a disfigured eye plots to unleash a dangerous drug on an already downtrodden unde...
2021-11-22 18:50:50 +0000 UTC View Post
You don’t see many erotic thrillers positioning the acquisition of a hentai animation studio and its affiliated websites as their central conflict. Demonlover not only does so, but makes it crackle with a thorny, uncomfortable sexual tension as we watch the brittle and sexually fixated Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen) try to maneuver he...
2021-11-20 01:47:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Shit pours down a funnel and into the mouth of a great ulcerous titan buried in the earth. It guzzles excrement without cease, processing ton after ton of filth through a bizarre system of organs naked to the outside world and then excreting it in turn through a biomechanical apparatus which reconstitutes waste into stick-figure golems of hair a...
2021-11-15 20:24:34 +0000 UTC View Post