scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Dune (2021)

About five minutes into Denis Villeneuve’s sprawling adaptation of the first half of Dune, author Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic, it becomes abundantly clear that the high water mark of the film’s visual imagination is roughly equivalent to a 2000s-era HALO game. Boxy neutral-tone spaceships and body armor for the...

I Would Like to See It: Three Outlaw Samurai

Three samurai, retainers of a cowardly and treacherous magistrate (Hisashi Igawa), burst into the chamber where louche prettyboy swordsman Kikyo (Mikijirō Hira) lies smoking opium with his lover. In a flash the camera is on the move, whipping out through a narrow gap between sliding screens and then along a walkway as without us the action spil...

I Would Like to See It: Andrei Rublev

Hundreds of bodies heave on cords of hempen rope, hauling a newly-cast church bell out of its casting pit as a crowd of thousands looks on in a rapture of nervous excitement. The hawsers creak. The scaffolds groan. Ton upon ton of human machinery strains against gravity and friction to unearth the skilled labor of dozens of craftsmen and hundred...

In the Flesh: The Perfection

The Perfection is an odd one for me. To start, it has multiple glaring flaws. The lighting is intermittently terrible, washed-out and lifeless. The dialog sometimes veers too deep into corny therapy-lite dreck. The “rewind” effect used to pull us through the ever-changing plot is hacky and drawn-out, and the film is unsubtle in borr...

I Would Like to See It: What Keeps You Alive

“Why are you doing this?” Jules (Brittany Allen) sobs to her wife Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson as an adult, Charlotte Lindsay Marron as a young girl) after the other woman first attempts to murder her, then stalks her through the forest intent on finishing the job. Jules wants a reason. Everyone does, when a loved one begins to reveal their...

Goblins, Ghosts, and Gabaghouls 1.01: People Come Here to Die

A bloody hand slips from a butcher’s cleaver as a man collapses to the floor, leaving streaks of red across the polished steel. Boys with toy pistols run beside an empty swimming pool, mimicking the sounds of gunshots as the mouth of the forest yawns black and deep behind them. And in the entrance hall of a retirement home, aged matriarch Livi...

I Would Like to See It: Witchhammer

An altar boy sees an old beggar woman (Lola Skrbková) steal the host during mass. When he tells the priest (Jiří Holý), he sets off a chain reaction of suspicion and petty grudges which culminates in the devastation of the parish and the surrounding holdings of Countess de Galle (Blanka Waleská) by a ruthless, cynical inquisitor, sir Boblig...

In the Flesh: Black Mass

The last time I reviewed Mike Flanagan’s work, I panned it. His The Haunting of Hill House-inspired adaptation of the same name was saccharine sludge, full of overwrought monologues and wooden performances, everything lit in a flatly ghastly greenish-gray like some kind of purgatorial office park interior, every set coldly impersonal....

I Would Like to See It: The House that Jack Built

“I’m not stupid,” says Jack (Mat Dillon), the film’s eponymous serial killer, moments before we see him bluff his way into a woman’s (the great Siobhan Fallon Hogan) home by first claiming to be a police officer who’s lost his badge, then pivoting to revealing himself as a pension manager conducting some kind of obtuse double-blind s...

In the Flesh: Malignant

Malignant looks pretty good for a James Wan flick, which is to say it resembles a modestly ambitious episode of CSI — the original series, not the Florida one with David Caruso. Lighting is uniformly blue-gray, blood is shoddily CGI’d in, and every set looks like part of the same Holiday Inn. It has a few of Wan’s beloved...

I Would Like to See It: Hana-Bi

Why water dead flowers? Why fly a kite without wings? Hana-bi, Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 Yakuza film, concerns itself largely with the beauty of caring for things that we’ve already lost. Kitano’s movie is structured around absences, from the specter of ex-cop Yoshitaka Nishi (Kitano) and his wife Miyuki’s (Kayoko Kishimoto) dead da...

I Would Like to See It: Phantom of the Paradise

To paraphrase my dear friend the game designer Jeeyon Shim, William Finley understands that acting is a profession totally devoid of dignity. As Winslow Leach, the film’s titular phantom, Finley has a gangly, wild-eyed physical sincerity teetering on the verge of cartoonishiness, a larger than life vibe De Palma’s camera teases and twists in...

In the Flesh: Faust (1926)

Vast black wings unfurl over a medieval German city. A sooty face grins from the shadow between them as smoke boils through the streets below. Faust himself, played with a hawkish yet vulnerable intensity by Gösta Ekman, hunches over his alchemical paraphernalia, his strong, severe countenance bathed in the glow of elements converting in a prim...

In the Flesh: Brand New Cherry Flavor

Disclaimer: One of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s three principal writers, Matt Fennell, is a friend of mine, though I didn’t know he’d worked on it until after I’d watched it

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Lost Highway, Under the Skin, and Videodrome, Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion’s ...

In the Flesh: Candyman (2021)

Who dies in horror movies, and why do they get got? Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, a sequel of sorts to Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic horror film of the same name, seems to posit that you die for being bad and punchable, or for rote high school bullying, or for being an art critic. I can’t deny that many of my colleagues are indeed asking ...

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I Would Like to See It: Tale of Tales

You might be forgiven, after decades of Disney “fairytales” and their “twisted” reboots — universally safe, morally digestible, and bland — for forgetting what fairytales are really like. Director Mattea Garrone’s Tale of Tales, adapted from Renaissance poet Giambattista Basile’s collection of the same name, has not forg...

I Would Like to See It: Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis is an oddity in David Cronenberg’s long history as a filmmaker. It’s cold where his work typically runs hot, overwritten where he tends toward sparseness in his dialogue, and existential where he inclines toward a certain earthiness. Part of this is the source material, the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, but where De...

I Would Like to See It: Naked

From the first moment Johnny Fletcher (David Thewlis) opens his mouth, the reason for both his constant success in charming strangers and his homeless and hated existence are both painfully obvious. He’s just smart and insightful enough to step right through social scripts and into moments of unguarded intimacy, but once he’s inside he can�...

In the Flesh: The Suicide Squad

For better and for worse, Suicide Squad is James Gunn, aging shock jock and Troma alum, to the core. The camerawork is serviceable at best, the humor sometimes flatly sexist in a sneering adolescent way — think of the military junta’s secretary, her breasts constantly jiggling as she runs in and out of frame — and the freaks are t...

I Would Like to See It: She Dies Tomorrow

At first blush, She Dies Tomorrow feels like the kind of deadpan social thriller we’ve seen so much of over the past decade. Think Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster or Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense — flat line deliveries mapping the absurdities of modern existence and mortality as the lives of faintly ridi...

I Would Like to See It: Like Water for Chocolate

I’m beginning to suspect that if you’re not a complete dunce, filming food and cooking is a pretty good way to ensure your movie feels richly sensual and intimate. Food is a shorthand for all kinds of foundational human emotions and relationship patterns, a visual language more immediately intelligible than heraldry, more universal than pict...

I Would Like to See It: The Platform

Like La Grande Bouffe and other eating-as-class movies of its ilk, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform locates class struggle in the fairly pat metaphor of who gets to eat what. In a Cube-like tower built from identical two-person cells and connected by a single empty shaft, the titular platform descends each day f...