IT LIVES INSIDE. As deeply as the tropes of teen horror movies are carved in the genre, a shift in perspective, in setting, in character can turn them on their head. Focused on an Indian American teenager, writer and director Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside opens up new avenues to explore isolation, shame and family […]
Mill Creek Cinema
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Poirot’s Ghost in A Haunting in Venice
A HAUNTING IN VENICE. I am both an Agatha Christie fan and philistine, coming to her stories second hand, via my mother’s avid reading and BBC productions. Drinking tea with jam and toast beside my mother on the sofa as we watched, Belgian dandy Hercule Poirot became and remains my favorite of Christie’s detectives. Christie […]
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The Nun II is a Holy Terror
THE NUN II. I would like to begin by acknowledging mistakes were made. Calendar editor Kali Cozyris and I giddily planned a trip to the movies as soon as we saw the trailer for this sequel, assuming we, as supernatural horror fans, were up to it. Granted, she should have worn a thicker shirt in […]
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Back in the Fight
MOTHER’S DAY. In my zeal for streaming action movies out of Asia, I may have slept on Poland. The first five minutes of Mateusz Rakowicz’s Dzien Matki, as it’s called pre-translation, set the tone, with the exhausted, rained-upon Nina Nowak (Agnieszka Grochowska) taking on a seven-pack of right-wing corner thugs with a six-pack of beer. […]
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Gran Turismo’s Sponsored Race
GRAN TURISMO. How does one approach a project such as this one, for all intents and purposes a feature length advertisement for the Gran Turismo game (sorry, simulator) franchise, Playstation/Sony and Nissan, without the cynicism immediately engendered by such shilling? With great difficulty and trepidation, would be my answer. On the other side of the […]
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Rabbit Holes and Shaggy Dogs
THE YOUTUBE EFFECT. As a Luddite, my contact with YouTube is infrequent, shallow and glancing: the occasional how-to, stand-up specials, squinty-eyed late-night music video ping-pong sessions, that’s about it. Living as I do in the allegory of the cave, though, I have at least some sense of how central the site is to many (most?) […]
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Vampires on a Boat
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER. Before the title character in Bram Stoker’s 1897 epistolary novel Dracula drinks his way through England, he travels there on a ship called the Demeter, as detailed in the chapter titled “The Captain’s Log.” Not to spoil a 126-year-old book further than the movie’s title does, but it’s a […]
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Bigger Sharks to Jump
THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH. Whether because or in spite of its unrepentant silliness (stupidity?), I found a lot to like about The Meg (2018). Jason Statham plying his acerbic brand of ass-kickery against a gigantic dinosaur shark? Yes, please, and some more, if there’s any. Thing is, I kind of thought I was more […]
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Talk to Me Makes Contact
TALK TO ME. Australia, home to venomous brown snakes, saltwater crocodiles and a snail that can evidently kill you with a tiny harpoon-like tooth, is scary enough. Perhaps the steady baseline of adrenaline that comes from living in a country where a very large spider might casually drop out of your curtains makes scaring audiences […]
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Bombs and Bombshells
OPPENHEIMER. It comes as no surprise that Christopher Nolan’s latest magnum opus should be heralded for its audacity and scale. He being a holdover from another time, if such a time even existed; all of his opuses are magnums. Seemingly to demonstrate this, or to prove that even the great director is susceptible to hubris, […]
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Making it Possible
What I couldn’t have articulated then, and perhaps cannot now, was director Brian De Palma’s critical role as both arbiter and synthesist of cinema cool, even as his career was approaching an inevitable cooling-off point and he his 60th birthday. De Palma wouldn’t become a touchstone for me until years later, incapable as I was […]
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The Joy of the Ride
JOY RIDE. It has been rather widely reported — but may still be apocryphal — that at some point during the development of this screenplay, the writers (Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao) thought to call it The Joy Fuck Club. Clearly, that title is a bit too outré for our provincial American sensibilities, but I […]