scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Mad Men s2e04 'Three Sundays'

“Get out, we’re… sleeping!” shouts Don, sprawled on top of Betty, as Bobby and Sally burst into their bedroom. Kids are everywhere in ‘Three Sundays’, the first episode of Mad Men to split its time between three separate storylines, a narrative move that would become a signature in later seasons. Sally takes her first t...

In the Flesh: Mad Men s1e13 'The Wheel'

‘The Wheel’ is without question the single best-known episode of Mad Men, made famous by the eponymous pitch Don gives to Kodak for their slideshow wheel. It’s a much-analyzed scene, a perennial favorite for cinephiles, and deservedly so. In the space of ninety seconds, with nothing but a few fleeting scenes of Don looking at pict...

In the Flesh: Mad Men s1e03 'The Marriage of Figaro'

A bathroom isn’t a bathroom. A gift isn’t a gift. A house isn’t a house. ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ is where Mad Men becomes Mad Men, a house of smoke and mirrors, a labyrinth of doors and windows leading nowhere, to nothing. At his daughter’s birthday party after being turned down by department store manager Rachel M...

Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter II

Captain Hathi i’Mati had served the emperor’s half-brother for almost four years now. The rajah Jahangir Eru Vandifatori, known to his inner circle as Jahan, did not often keep high-ranking retainers for so long. Indeed, Hathi had killed his own predecessor, Captain Indirat, just six months into the woman’s career. He could still see her l...

Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter I

Slava didn’t like the wizard. She didn’t like his soft, slender hands, or his white skin, unmarred by windburn or the sun. She didn’t like his gentle voice or his long, flowing hair the color of cornsilk. His gold, though, she could tolerate. When they returned to Virk she would have enough to buy a tract of land and a small herd of goats,...

Paper Cuts: Kill Six Billion Demons

Tom Bloom’s Kill Six Billion Demons is big, ambitious, and omnivorous, a tasting menu informed by hundreds of discrete influences ranging from Hindu mythology to Dragon Ball Z to the illustrations of Wayne Barlowe. Following Allison Ruth, a sorority sister imbued with the power of a dethroned king of the multiverse, Bloom’s...

In the Flesh: Heat

Six years ago, I really didn’t like this movie. I don’t know if I was distracted or just in a bad mood, but watching it now I can’t for the life of me understand why I wrote the things I did. This is a stone-cold son of a bitch of a flick, a movie about love and disposability, about living your calling, about what family is and isn’t, an...

SIGN OF THE DRAGONFLY: PROLOGUE

Prologue: The Stairs

Hama hated the climb to his master’s rooms. Sixty-seven steps hewn from rough limestone led up to the first landing and its mullioned window of unblemished glass panes looking out over Saffron Bay and the forest of masts that swayed on the water; these weren’t so bad. Then a door to the left of the faded tapestry o...

In the Flesh: Jason and the Argonauts

Human mannerisms, but no human expressions. A gaze, but no eyes, only empty pits. Animator Ray Harryhausen’s great bronze statue of the titan Talos is chilling as much for what isn’t there as for what is, an alienating collection of the familiar, the discordant, and the conspicuously absent. The high, wailing groan of the statue’s bronze b...

In the Flesh: Clash of the Titans (1981)

Watching this movie makes me feel like Tony Soprano showing his daughter, Meadow, the church their ancestors helped to build on a crew of masons before grumbling, “Go out there now and try to find me two guys who can put decent grout around your bathtub.” People edited the scenes in Clash of the Titans in which human actors fight ha...

In the Flesh: The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

It takes a bold creative team to step into the world of Peter Jackson’s monumental Lord of the Rings trilogy, much less to do so with an animated film. Kenji Kamiyama’s War of the Rohirrim, unlike some other recent efforts I could name, earns its stripes and then some. From its loving animation, marred only by...

Top 10 of 2024

10. DUNE PART 2, DENIS VILLENEUVE

Villeneuve got me at last! The second half of his Dune adaptation is as thrill...

In the Flesh: Nosferatu (2024)

Eggers’ Nosferatu is beautiful, full of sumptuous shadows and exquisitely dressed rooms. It sports an embarrassment of acting talent, with Lily-Rose Depp luminously ghoulish as the tormented Ellen Hutter and Nicholas Hoult practically coming out of his skin as her broken and terrified husband, Thomas. That Willem Dafoe, more skull-lik...

In the Flesh: The Muppet Christmas Carol

How do you write with any kind of objectivity about a film that shaped your childhood so profoundly? A Muppet Christmas Carol is the season entire, to me, a heartfelt plea for everyone to better themselves, to believe, yes, but also to act, to give, and in giving, learn to receive love. I know each of Paul Williams’ songs by ...

In the Flesh: Smile 2

You don’t usually see good fake pop music. Think of the dead-eyed, lifeless numbers in Shyamalan’s Trap from earlier this year, so non-specific they barely register as music at all, or even the name of the performer, Lady Raven, so clearly at odds with the blandly fun and peppy public image she projects. Smile 2, by contras...

In the Flesh: Heretic

“I keep these women a bit wet and a bit nippy,” says Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), grinning with avuncular charm at Mormon missionary Sister Paxton (Chloe East) from the head of a room full of caged women, “but only for the same reason your church brings Bibles to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane. It’s easier to control people who’ve lost eve...

In the Flesh: War and Peace (1966-67)

The first blush of combat in Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental adaptation of Tolstoy’s masterpiece is a staggering sensory experience. Thousands of uniformed soldiers maneuver onscreen, forming lines and squares, jockeying for position in the hills of Lower Austria. Smoke drifts in waves from ranks of muskets and the belching mouths of cannon. ...

In the Flesh: Dune: Prophecy s1e03 'Sisterhood Above All'

Anchored by bravura performances by Jessica Barden as a young Valya and Emma Canning as a young Tula, ‘Sisterhood Above All’ is the series’s nastiest and most engaging episode to date. The centerpiece here is Tula (Olivia Williams) reflecting on her adolescent attempt to exact revenge against the Atreides for her brother’s alleged murder...

In the Flesh: Megalopolis

Take Shakespeare’s Roman plays, a double handful of modern politics run through a blender on pulse for about half an hour, a dash of transcendental psychedelica, and a few decades of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, and you’ve got Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Sprawling, messy, fantastical, oddly hopeful, naive, po...

In the Flesh: Gladiator 2

Never show me Matt Lucas. There is no reason good enough to show me Matt Lucas. He radiates an anti-charisma so powerful that even casting him perfectly as the shrieking, freakish mouthpiece of a dying empire isn’t enough to make his onscreen presence tolerable. Between his presence and the woefully miscast Paul Mescal as the adult Lucius, the...

In the Flesh: Dune: Prophecy s1e02 'Two Wolves'

It’s one thing to watch a cold and calculating power player like the Bene Gesserit mother superior, Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson), spend human lives like subway tokens. It’s another to see her sister, the reverend mother Tula (Olivia Williams), sacrifice the novice she loves like a daughter for the sake of a few cryptic words. Williams give...

In the Flesh: Castration Movie Pt. 1

Star and director Louise Weard begins and ends the first half of her operatically-sized Castration Movie with broken people trying and failing to be in love. First there’s Turner (Noah Baker) and his girlfriend Brooklyn (Jasmine Provins), a nominally cishet couple with all the chemistry of peanut butter and mayonnaise, their rela...

In the Flesh: Dune: Prophecy s1e01 'The Hidden Hand'

All the stars are here! Mark Strong, Emily Watson, Olivia Williams, Travis Fimmell, and a half dozen more genre and period stalwarts anchor the exciting and enigmatic series premiere of Diane Ademu-John and Alison Schapker’s Dune: Prophecy. To call a big-budget genre series created, helmed by, and starring women — especially older w...

In the Flesh: Conclave

Take Paolo Sorrentino’s visionary, brazenly experimental The Young Pope, turn the saturation down about seventy percent so that everything looks more or less grayish brown, as is de rigueur, strip away the mystery, the sexuality, the insight into the church’s nature and its potentiality, and finally remove the humanity from...

In the Flesh: Arcane Season 2, First Arc

Brought to life by French animation studio Fortiche, Arcane remains in its second season easily the most beautiful animated show on the air. Hand-painted cells applied to an underlying scaffold of computer animation smooth away the latter medium’s tendency toward the stiff and the janky while enabling the animators to lay out action s...

The Raptor

I can hear the pachys working out their morning jitters before I open my eyes. Their paddock is about twenty yards from my window, and the echoing crack when their bony skulls collide is loud enough that I haven’t used my alarm clock in months. I roll over in bed to watch them at it, Brutus and Caesar leaping on the climbing rocks, swinging th...

In the Flesh: La Reigne Margot

“I knew you would be beautiful… luminous,” says the injured and delirious La Môle (Vincent Perez) as he lies bleeding in his lover Margot’s (Isabelle Adjani) arms, believing her to be the angel of death. As in so much of Patrice Chéreau’s La Reigne Margot, death and sexuality are never far apart. This moment of morbid intima...

In the Flesh: Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus doesn’t work without David Jonsson as the android Andy. The synthetic person’s transformation from a shaky, well-meaning adult child who lives only to protect his surrogate sister, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), to a sad-eyed arbiter of life and death aboard the titular space station is far and away the most compelling arc on ...

In the Flesh: Strange Darling

J. T. Mollner’s Strange Darling opens on a protracted monologue straight out of a Feminism 101 pamphlet, with the Lady (Willa Fitzgerald) explaining to the Demon (Kyle Gallner) that women take their lives in their hands with every hookup. Neither Fitzgerald nor Gallner does bad work, exactly, but the hamfisted gee-whiz tone of their b...

In the Flesh: 'Salem's Lot (2024)

There’s a lot to like about Gary Dauberman’s ‘Salem’s Lot, an adaptation of Stephen King’s classic vampire novel of the same name. Bill Camp is tremendously likable as the caring, perceptive school teacher Matt Burke, the color grading is refreshingly vibrant and thoughtful, Alfre Woodard is great as Dr. Cody, and child actor ...