Hey all; I can't tell you how touched I am by your support during all this. I wanted to let you know that I've been struggling through a depressive episode but that You Love to See It will be caught up this coming week, and also that I understand completely if you need to reduce or end your pledge during this whole mess. If you do cancel but sti...
2020-04-25 18:42:36 +0000 UTC View Post
@omenids' beautiful cover for Milk Teeth, my upcoming collection of short medieval horror fiction! It's been delayed for EXCITING REASONS that I can't talk about yet, but it should be coming soon!
2020-04-18 22:56:25 +0000 UTC View Post
What the fuck is this movie? How did it get funded? Why is Vincent Cassell here? Is it even a movie, or did a Mortal Kombat game’s character select screen gain sentience and escape onto film? A zombie-armed French aristocrat with a sword-whip made of sharpened bone, a goth Papal assassin played by Monica Bellucci, a royal tax...
2020-04-10 21:03:01 +0000 UTC View Post
In all of film there’s nothing quite like Addams Family Values, a campy collection of gothic and violently absurd vignettes loosely joined together by a single gleeful, frustrated, malevolent thread. That thread is live-in nanny slash serial murderess Debbie Jelinsky, the film’s antagonist. As played by the great Joan Cusack, Debbie...
2020-04-10 17:31:54 +0000 UTC View PostThe instructors tell them to masturbate before their drills. Focus is crucial, hard-ons a distraction. They do it together, facing away from each other, looking at the porn they’re given. Sleek teenage girls spreading themselves. Older women with thick hips and heavy breasts looking wide-eyed over their shoulders as though surprised while chan...
2020-04-08 00:04:12 +0000 UTC View PostHey gang, given that theaters are closed, I'm going to start doing 2-4 repertory reviews a month. I'll be watching and writing about classic and contemporary films, and if there's anything you'd particularly like to see me touch on, feel free to let me know in the comments!
2020-04-03 19:12:30 +0000 UTC View Post
The first forty minutes of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is all domino-setting and wisecracks. Sam Neill humiliates a middle schooler, Richard Attenborough says “spared no expense” a half-dozen times, and we get to slow down twice to let the reality of the dinosaurs sink in and to experience the genuine wonder of their existence. Then...
2020-04-03 04:48:04 +0000 UTC View Post
When Patrick Bateman kills women, he uses tools to do it. A chainsaw for the sex workers he lures to his apartment; a nail gun when he considers murdering Jean, his secretary. When he murders men, he uses weapons. A knife for the homeless man he guts in an alleyway; an ax for Paul Allen, a coworker whose popularity and connections inspire jealou...
2020-03-27 16:50:24 +0000 UTC View Post
The Mask of Zorro, which in 1998 came hot on the heels of the ultra-macho action movies of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and just before the modern wave of snarky, factory-produced blockbusters, is a perfect encapsulation in film of the experience of being eight years old and eating an ice cream cone. It’s a mess, it’s nothing bu...
2020-03-21 04:15:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 film about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, begins with the young Francesco di Bernardone returning gravely ill from war with Perugia to recuperate at his lavish family home. Francesco’s illness is shot like a metamorphosis, his sweating body cocooned in linen bandages, his face s...
2020-03-15 19:34:56 +0000 UTC View Post
From the first moment they form, our memories are dying. Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire deals with the illusory permanence of art and the fleeting nature of love and passion, its minimalist restraint and intense intimacy surprisingly well-suited to one another. It dives into the practice of art without melodram...
2020-03-09 05:54:17 +0000 UTC View Post
As horror author Garth Marenghi once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Nowhere does that philosophy prove out more definitively than in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguably the director’s last great film and certainly his most extravagant. Starring Gary Oldman as the titular v...
2020-03-06 03:27:07 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s the little things that make for good suspense. A shot of an empty doorway lingering just long enough to let the viewer’s expectations about what will or won’t come through it make a full and anxious circuit. A mirror positioned just right to catch the glint of a knife as it’s raised to strike. The Invisible Man, Leigh Whann...
2020-03-01 01:28:02 +0000 UTC View Post
The soundtrack to Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 1995 gangster opus, is of a piece with much of the director’s other material about organized crime. It’s a collage of towering classical music, rock and roll, Rhythm and Blues standards, and everyone from Roxy Music to Otis Redding. The effect is kaleidoscopic, a moment in time crystalli...
2020-02-29 04:13:07 +0000 UTC View Post
The baby in David Lynch’s 1977 nightmarish arthouse feature Eraserhead embodies a complex synthesis of fears and anxieties. With its labored, phlegmy breathing, frail neck, and filmy eyes it invokes the specter of crib death — of the terrifying fragility of infants. Its alien appearance expresses the estrangement of the adults aroun...
2020-02-21 20:57:46 +0000 UTC View PostHe did not come in a procession. Nor did he come hooded, as was usual, but barefoot and bare-headed, his dark hair cropped to dusty stubble. He was beautiful, thought Giulia de Codico, the merchant’s daughter, who watched him cross the plaza from where she stood waiting for her father outside of the dyer’s shop. Her courses had come that mor...
2020-02-20 07:50:14 +0000 UTC View Post
"You look at me sometimes." Five words, and in them we can see the entire soul of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Scotty, a lonely, socially awkward young gay man living on the margins of the 1970s California porn industry. Boogie Nights is a movie about trying again and again to spin the love you never got out of whole cloth, and when Scotty...
2020-02-14 06:44:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Like its protagonist, jeweler and gambling addict Howard “Howie Bling” Ratner, Uncut Gems is an opaque, abrasive, overwhelming experience. Its fairytale synth score and manic, scrabbling camera sketch a world defined by Howie’s addictive magical thinking. The high of winning, the thrill of spinning a dream out of bullshit and adre...
2020-02-12 03:43:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 adaptation of acclaimed novelist John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is an almost pathologically quiet film. Its focus rests not on the knife’s-edge tension and sudden violence of field work but on the banality of tradecraft on home soil, the colorless rooms and colorless people and the colorless s...
2020-02-10 20:15:30 +0000 UTC View Post
There are four action scenes of note in Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey. The second of these, in which Harley Quinn (Margo Robbie) stages a one-woman raid on a Gotham police station, is the film’s best. A bean bag launcher complete with colored smoke and confetti packed into each shell punctuates each shot with cartoonish flair, and Yan e...
2020-02-10 00:59:09 +0000 UTC View Post
So much of The New Pope's beauty rests in the conscious physicality of its actors, as obviously unique from character to character as the show's voices, faces, and wardrobes. Assente's curtly effete grace, Voiello's meditative stillness and minimalist gestures, Sofia's teasing, swaying walk and the playful movements she makes with her h...
2020-02-04 06:26:47 +0000 UTC View Post
A silent observer stands on a shale beach in the north of Scotland, watching people drown. A woman is swept screaming out to sea. A wetsuit-clad swimmer pulls her desperate husband out of the surf only for the man to stagger back into the water, leaving his rescuer spent and gasping on the rocks, and join his wife. Through it all a baby sits wai...
2020-02-01 16:00:24 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a certain shock inherent in seeing John Paul III proceed with moderation and decorum through the Papal speeches and ceremonies which Pius XIII upended, tore apart, and used as a chance to force his underlings into submission. Francis II, just last week, did much the same as Pius in his own syrupy, iconoclastic way, and now the reassert...
2020-01-29 00:46:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Aliens, James Cameron’s 1986 action-horror followup to Ridley Scott’s 1979 sleeper hit, starts twice, but don’t mistake that for a stumble. For the first twenty-odd minutes we follow Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the sole survivor of the titular organism’s predation in the previous film, as she wakes from decades of cryogenic sle...
2020-01-24 20:56:22 +0000 UTC View Post“One mouthful per worker,” buzzed the queen’s flickering hologram, looming over the line of marching ants. Rugel advanced past the nearest seer — balanced on her forelimbs and cradling the hologram between her terminal pair like a dying blue-white sun — toward the hill of half-melted pink spun sugar draped over the mossy sto...
2020-01-23 19:33:24 +0000 UTC View Post“These,” says Billie, tapping a chewed bio-nail against the glass display case. She blows a virulent blue bubble with her chewing gum, then pops it with a quick flex of her tongue and snaps the sticky wad against the roof of her mouth. The sound echoes in the tastefully underlit salon. Behind the case a shadow moves, taking down the flat she...
2020-01-21 20:11:28 +0000 UTC View Post
“When I was a boy,” cardinal Gutierrez begins, his melancholy features shifting briefly into a faint smile of nostalgia, “a man took advantage of me.” The way actor Javier Cámara delivers the line is bottomlessly sad and gentle, a fitting end to an episode which takes place mostly inside a titanic monument to deathless, endless grief. B...
2020-01-21 04:08:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Space cruisers blast at each other point-blank like ships of the line. Clouds of fighters swirl, disintegrate, and reform amid the flurrying laser bolts and plasma shells as our heroes plummet straight into the maelstrom, looping around the vast hulls of dying warships and skimming the edges of explosions that gut city-sized expanses of armored ...
2020-01-18 03:36:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Watching the premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The New Pope is like inhaling a breath of clean mountain air after a decade spent living in an attic. The cleanly symbolist camera work, the idiosyncratic faces of its cast of ecclesiarchs and power brokers, the rich, brilliant colors and eclectic soundtrack — it’s creative in t...
2020-01-14 04:12:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern opens with a close shot of Songlian (Gong Li) assenting with stoic misery to end her university career and marry in accordance with her father and stepmother’s wishes. We never see her parents, just as we never see a clear shot of her wealthy husband’s face. Instead we linger on Songlian as she ...
2020-01-10 21:54:13 +0000 UTC View Post