Reading Time: 2 minutes If there’s a through-line to some of the best movies of 2022 thus far, it’s a fixation on the body’s inexorable march toward decay and a perverse, giddy freedom in embracing it. Or, as Léa Seydoux declares in Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s squirm-inducing return to body horror, “Let us create a map that […]
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Posted inFilm/TV
Review: ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ short on dinosaurs, entertainment
Reading Time: 2 minutes The original Jurassic Park had fewer than 100 visual effects shots. That they still look good decades later is a testament to that film’s talented production team, which included Stan Winston, whose life-sized animatronics gave Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) animators plenty of on set reference material for how the creatures were supposed to look […]
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Review: In the age of streaming, ‘Satantango’ remains as captivating as ever
Reading Time: 3 minutes Sátántangó’s opening shot follows a herd of cows wandering a desolate town. The shot is nearly eight minutes long and free of human dialogue, an act of provocation in its deliberate simplicity and harbinger of things to come. Eight minutes down, about 430 to go—Béla Tarr’s 1994 masterpiece has a daunting runtime of over seven […]
Posted inGen Z Rising
‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ retains magnetic hold on Gen Z, one year later
Reading Time: 7 minutes Return with me, if you will, to May 2021. Another summer was rounding the corner, and we were still locked inside of our homes. What many assumed at first would be a temporary lifestyle change had proven stubborn beyond our wildest fears. “This was supposed to be two weeks, not two years,” Meg (24) recalls. […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Review roundup: ‘Row 19’ and ‘Firestarter’
Reading Time: 3 minutes As a child, Katerina was the sole survivor of a mysterious plane crash that left her motherless. She grows up to become a psychologist specializing in fear management (played by Svetlana Ivanova), and, as proof of mastery over her past, now embarks on a commercial flight with a moppet of her own in tow to […]
Posted inHuman Story podcast
How an Indian film changed my son’s life | Jennifer Hancock
Learning that she didn’t know the name or work of the most famous actor in the world sent lifelong movie enthusiast Jennifer Hancock down a rabbit hole into the massive film industry of India. In the process, she found insights about love that are rarely touched in Western cinema—and solved a puzzle about her own […]
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Review: ‘Hit the Road’ is a sharp-witted directorial debut
Reading Time: 2 minutes There was a tweet by critic Matt Singer that made the Internet rounds earlier this month consisting of a screenshot of available showtimes for the AMC theater in Times Square, all for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It’s a lot of showtimes. “This is not all of them,” Singer’s tweet reads, “I couldn’t […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Stanleyville’ thumbs nose at meritocracy, basically everything
Reading Time: 2 minutes Kisangani is a major commercial port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Under Belgian colonization it was known as Stanleyville, after Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame. Stanley had been tapped by Belgian King Leopold II to establish a foothold for eventual annexation of the region. In 1897 […]
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Christian show ‘The Chosen’ vandalizes its own billboards to generate buzz
Reading Time: 4 minutes In an attempt to portray themselves as better than other forms of faith-based media, the producers of a new Christian TV show engaged in the most stereotypically evangelical scheme ever: They depicted themselves as victims of persecution when no such thing was actually happening. The show is The Chosen, which generated plenty of (earned) media […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Double-feature review: ‘The Northman’ and ‘Saturday Fiction’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Back in 1996, writers Andrew Strader and Nick Nicholas took a mildly funny running gag from Star Trek VI to the final frontier of nerdom by translating all of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Klingon. Because wouldn’t it be hilariously incongruous if the warlike baddies from the original series (sorry, Worf) were also super invested in the […]