LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL. After a brief, pleasantly surprising period of infatuation with modern, low-budget horror, my enthusiasm precipitously — maybe inevitably — declined. But as it has been, so shall it ever be, and the “breakthrough,” every few decades or so, of a group of inspired, well-executed movies will typically be followed in […]
Broadway Cinema
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Love Lies Bleeding‘s Genre Breakthrough
LOVE LIES BLEEDING. One might not have suspected there was room to develop new sub-genres within film noir, much less imagined that hyper-stylized, ultra-violent, Southwestern lesbian romance bodybuilding revenge noir could prove such a fertile and vibrant one. This lack of vision is forgivable, both because almost nobody could have foreseen this development and because […]
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Oscar Worthy
So as not to be accused of bad faith arguments, a disclosure: I did not watch the 2024 Academy Awards presentation ceremony. In fact, I don’t think I have watched the thing in over a decade. This year, I second-screened — I know modern things! — while I prepared meals and watched Cocktail (1988) on […]
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Spectacle and Substance in Dune: Part Two
DUNE: PART TWO. Looking back, it seems almost egregious not to have reviewed Dune (2021) at greater length upon its release. But then I remind myself that we live in genuinely crazy times and the times of two and a half years ago were maybe even crazier. Late 2021 was a brief era of momentary […]
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Women on the Run
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS. With the dissolution of the artistic and commercial enterprise that was the Coen Brothers sometime in the beginning of the end of the world (2018-ish), one of the most innovative and imitated dynasties in American cinema came to its apparent end. And with it, perhaps, an epoch of satirical invention transcending form and […]
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Swan Dive
FEUD: CAPOTE VS. THE SWANS. Whoever said, “Hating someone is like drinking poison every day and expecting the other person to die,” clearly never saw The Princess Bride. Of course, there is a caustic burn going down, but a good low-stakes grudge can be energizing, feeding competition and giving focus to the day’s million scattered […]
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Not Valentine’s Day
Some might say I am not a romantic. I don’t think it a fair criticism, nor do I think it’s true. At the same time, though, I don’t intend to write anything here about Valentine’s Day movies. And even though I’m sure there is something in Lisa Frankenstein — a neon-tinged reanimation teen rom-com — […]
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Zone of Interest‘s Horrors, Seen and Unseen
THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Presented with the briefest description of this, e.g. a glimpse inside the domestic life of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, one’s mind might immediately go to Hannah Arendt’s commentary regarding the “banality of evil.” Which is a reasonable leap, as that phrase has so frequently come into use when […]
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Monsters of Our Own Making
POOR THINGS. Yorgos Lanthimos — born of the glorious, unholy, chimeric union of Luis Buñuel, Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam — has spent much of his storied career exploring parentage, innocence and humanity’s baser impulses through the bleak and delightful lens of his particular brand of absurdism. And now, having joined in a bizarre and […]
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Might Have Beens
With the joys and horrors of our most recent, apolitical global cataclysm rapidly diminishing beyond the remembering, we return to some version of normal. Which is to say, many of the smaller, headier but nonetheless celebrated releases of 2023 are just now making their way to screens where country folk like ourselves can access them. […]
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Who’s Game?
SELF RELIANCE. Having not yet watched Minx — the Starz smut-mag series — I last checked in with multi-hyphenate Jake Johnson for Ride the Eagle (2021), a charmingly unassuming indie throwback from a time when, still in the throes of the plague, we could be forgiven for thinking the movie business might be in for […]
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Good Grief‘s Best Friends
GOOD GRIEF. With a brief break in the rain at last, I was in no mood to delve into the weedy waters of grief this week but here we are. Had it not been Dan Levy writing, directing and starring in the Netflix drama/comedy/romance, I would have spared myself all thought beyond what an 80-minute […]