CIVIL WAR. I would never call myself a science fiction head, as much for fear of reprisals from within the community as for the sake of accuracy. When the genre works, though, it can deliver vivid, exciting, not-so-thinly veiled commentary on the triumphs and tragedies of humanity as we have known it. Properly executed, it […]
Minor Theatre
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The First Omen and Monkey Man Fight Dirty
THE FIRST OMEN. With the recent spate of horror movies centered around nuns — from the Conjuring universe’s spinoff and 2023 sequel, Immaculate’s robes only lately sweeping out of the theater and now The First Omen opening — one wonders how recruitment is going. The Omen (1976), stars a fully gray Gregory Peck as a […]
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Hash of the Titans
GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE. For a giant lizard, Godzilla has evolved. At this point, his multiverse timelines are overlapping, with reboots from Japan and the U.S. passing each other at the box office, Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One finishing its acceptance speeches just as Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire hits theaters. The 1954 […]
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Devils and Do-Overs
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 […]
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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 […]