Reading Time: 7 minutes A neat trick: From Star Wars to Watchmen to Disco Elysium, stories with strong anti-capitalist messages are increasingly co-opted and turned into the very capitalist sausage they once attacked.
movies
Posted inFilm/TV
Comedy duo: ‘Triangle of Sadness’ and ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Reading Time: 4 minutes After a year short on laughs—in world affairs and at the cineplex—it’s welcome to have two excellent new comedies drop almost simultaneously. Don’t let the title deter you. Triangle of Sadness had me laughing out loud more than any film since 2020’s Borat sequel. As an added bonus, it has the best comedic vomiting sequence […]
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‘Hell-Bound Train’ (1930)—an ingenious moralizing oddity of early Black cinema
Reading Time: 3 minutes A few years ago, to fill in some gaps left by my formal education, I took a community college course on African American history. The assigned textbook, Freedom on My Mind, contains a still image from the 1915 Civil War/Reconstruction epic The Birth of a Nation. “D. W. Griffith’s silent cinematic masterpiece The Birth of […]
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Texas mom: ‘Hocus Pocus 2’ will make you ‘fall victim to the schemes of hell’
Reading Time: 4 minutes Congratulations to KWTX in Texas for finding the most insane Christian mom in the community, convincing her it was a good idea to appear on camera so she could tell viewers that the biggest threat to their children was the movie Hocus Pocus 2, and then making sure the camera was fully zoomed in on […]
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Review: ‘Pearl’ and ‘Blonde’: great horror, misleading marketing
Reading Time: 3 minutes If you stuck around through the end credits of Ti West’s retro slasher X this past spring, you were treated to a campy teaser advertising Pearl, a prequel promising the origin story of that film’s horny, homicidal antagonist gamely played by Mia Goth (who also plays X’s aspiring adult film star Maxine. X is a […]
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Review: Věra Chytilová’s ‘Daisies’ remains a defiant, delightful oddity
Reading Time: 2 minutes The first time I saw Věra Chytilová’s Daisies was on a double bill with Godard’s Weekend at the New Beverly in Los Angeles, circa 2014. I went in blind and was rewarded with 76 minutes of anarchistic joy. Earlier this week I happened upon yet another screening of Daisies, this time a 4K restoration at […]
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Review: ‘Prey’ is a trophy case of good filmmaking
Reading Time: 2 minutes Concluding 2022’s surprise “women marching into the dark, unknowable wilderness” trilogy that began with Firestarter and Hellbender is Dan Trachtenberg’s remarkable Prey. Quietly the fifth installment of the Predator franchise, a series of action/science fiction films involving extraterrestrial game hunters, Prey is the rare prequel unencumbered by lore or smug callbacks that refines the core […]
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Review: ‘Strawberry Mansion’ an imaginative delight
Reading Time: 2 minutes Upon finishing the charmingly lo-fi Strawberry Mansion, which I and much of the rest of society missed this past February (it earned a little over $97 thousand at the box office), I went into one of those semi-deranged Google search death spirals, so vexed by the memory of some reminiscent genre-bending pastiche. The movie in […]
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Review: ‘Elvis’ + ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’m hard pressed to name anything registering as a complete scene in Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s fever dream of an Elvis Presley biopic that doesn’t so much cover the landmark events of the superstar musician’s life and career as it condenses those moments into an extended trailer advertising the American mid-twentieth century. That isn’t a criticism; […]
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Before MeToo, Egypt’s ‘Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story’ put a spotlight on gender inequality
Reading Time: 2 minutes African and Middle Eastern cinema tends to receive precious little attention in the United States, with Iran among the better represented in terms of State-side theatrical distribution (such as Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road, shamefully the only 2022 Middle Eastern release I’ve seen so far). Streaming and the DVD market have done a great deal […]