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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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 […]
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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 […]
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A call to attend Netflix’s ‘Midnight Mass’
Reading Time: 14 minutes Horror, very often, is not its own means to an end but a vehicle to deliver themes and underlying messages. We might look here to George Romero’s 1978 seminal classic Dawn of the Dead in the understanding that it was an attack on American consumerism possessing the population like a viral disease. In fact, this […]
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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 […]
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‘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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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 […]
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Michael Bay excess finds worthy outlet in ‘Ambulance’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Following the Sam Raimi retrospective on the Blank Check podcast (they recently covered Army of Darkness) offers a renewed appreciation for Raimi’s madcap ingenuity. Film nerd legend has it that The Evil Dead lacked the funds for a camera dolly, so Raimi and crew constructed a wooden platform to slide a camera down that would […]
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‘Cow,’ ‘Gunda,’ and the strangeness of the mundane
Reading Time: 2 minutes The first movie I watched theatrically in 2021, following roughly a year of streaming and semi-deranged DVD hoarding, was Viktor Kossakovsky’s livestock documentary Gunda. Shot in crisp black and white, Gunda wordlessly follows the titular sow and her piglets on a pleasant-looking Norwegian farm. There’s no human dialogue or narration to orient the viewer, no […]