LATEST FILM REVIEWS
Undertone Review: The Terror at the Edge of Hearing
The cinematic horror of seeing something terrifying can become predictable. In Undertone, it’s the nightmare of hearing something truly terrifying that engulfs the audience in new fears. Sound is everything in Undertone. Throughout her day, Evy (Nina Kiri, The Handmaid’s Tale) is listening to her sick mother (Michèle Duquet) breathing, with the constant knowledge that…
Pompei: Below the Clouds Review: A Little Perspective
Gianfranco Rosi’s ruminative documentary about living in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius begins with a useful perspective – that of Pliny the Younger, eyewitness to the devastating eruption in 79 AD that buried the city of Pompeii and others under volcanic ash. An unseen narrator reads aloud from his account (“A cloud rose up. It was…
The Bride! Review: Frankenstein’s Riot Grrrl
In punk cinema, you’re either a Derek Jarman or an Alex Cox. Jarman was a master of subversive control, a genius in finding beauty in ugliness and perversion in the divine. Alex Cox threw everything at the wall and hoped something stuck. There are moments in The Bride!, writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s violent, stylized revamp of…
Hoppers Review: Pixar Becomes One With Nature
Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) is no Doctor Dolittle. She loves animals – a lot more than she does people – but all she can do is watch. Luckily, her college biology professor (Kathy Najimy) has built a robot beaver body that, through brain transfer science, she can pop her mind into and then…
Sirāt Review: The Sound of Violence
In Islamic theology, As-Sirāt is the bridge to paradise that all souls must pass over on Yawm al-Qiyama, the day of resurrection. It’s with overt dark humor that French director Oliver Laxe references that passageway in the opening text before Sirāt, his fourth feature. According to the hadith, the faithful will cross the bridge easily,…
A Poet Review: Portrait of a Has-Been Artist
Middle-aged and unemployed, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is still clinging to the minor success of two slim volumes of poetry he published in his 20s. Despite saying wincing things out loud like “suffering has been the raw material of my poetry,” Oscar is no misunderstood genius. He’s not even misunderstood: His siblings rightly identify him…
How to Make a Killing Review: Greedy for Revenge
When Glen Powell donned a murderers’ row of faces for Hit Man, the first point of comparison was the beautifully twisted classic British black comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets. In it, Alec Guinness played eight members of a British aristocratic family, all of whom were assassinated by a disowned twig on the family tree. It…
Cold Storage Review: Horror Comedy Moves Too Quick to Get Moldy
If you’ve never been to a government surplus sale, I can fully recommend the experience. You never know what you’ll find: old electronics, used furniture, pre-worn clothing, and maybe even a former secret military base in which NASA left a mutant fungus that could eradicate the world. Well, having once found a watch in a…
Pillion Review: Holding on Tight
It’s possible that the only reason that writer/director Harry Lighton didn’t work Depeche Mode’s “Behind the Wheel” as a needle drop into queer biker drama Pillion is that the song is explicitly about driving, not riding a motorcycle. That, and he’d be accused of being too on-the-nose about the themes of submission and adoration inherent…
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Review: Apocalypse Now, Then, and the Near Future
I admitted to my editor that I’m not a Gore-head – that is to say, I’m not a die-hard fan of the 10-years-dormant directorial style of Gore Verbinski. But I’m not a hater, I swear: While his take on J-horror classic Ringu I find miscast and overly sentimental, as a child of the Aughts I’m…
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie Review: The Joke’s Still Funny
Does a joke get funnier the more you tell it, or is it only if you tell it sporadically over a long period of time? Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have been telling their one joke about their fictional band, Nirvanna, for almost 20 years. It’s pretty simple: Aspiring musicians Matt (Johhnson) and Jay (McCarrol)…
“Wuthering Heights” Review: Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?
The worth and weight of Wuthering Heights as a great novel is in its complexity, its intergenerational tragedy and narrative murkiness among two interlinked families on the Yorkshire Moors. For the 16th cinematic adaptation, writer/director Emerald Fennell script repeats the cardinal offense that has been enacted against the book time and time again by ignoring…
Whistle Review: Death Comes Quickly in This Supernatural Horror
There’s a twisted ingenuity at the heart of Whistle, the new horror from the pen of former Austin literary scene mainstay Owen Egerton. The victims of the supernatural shocker meet the final fate that they always would have faced: It’s just a lot earlier than they’d hope. That’s explained to teen investigators Chrys (Dafne Keen,…
Dracula Review: Dead And Not Loving It
There are three major influences on just about every modern film version of Dracula. First, of course, Bram Stoker’s seminal epistolary nightmare. Second is the 1927 stage production and subsequent film starring Bela Lugosi, which introduced the idea of the vampire as charismatic sex symbol. However, no less influential is the 1974 movie, crafted by…
The Moment Review: Brat Summer Is Definitely Over
Say “music mockumentary” and most people immediately go to This Is Spinal Tap, or its precursors, All You Need Is Cash and the “Bad News Tour” episode of the British TV series The Comic Strip Presents. The setup is comics playing fictional musicians and often inadvertently becoming real-life rock stars in the process. Yet there’s…
OBEX Review: A Very Eighties-Coded Oddity
It’s 1987 in Baltimore, Maryland. A Nightmare on Elm Street is about to make its broadcast debut, George Bush Sr. is running for president, the country is in the buzzing depths of a 17-year cicada cycle, and digitizing an image means sending a photo to someone like Computer Conor, who’ll then convert it by hand…
Arco Review: A Child in Time
In animated science fiction oddity Arco, the fate of the Earth is set. It’s the place of one lost boy in it that is very much in question. That place, however, is not a “where” but a “when.” Balancing the very clear influences of Hideo Miyazaki, Mœbius, and René Laloux (Strange Planet), first-time feature director…
Send Help Review: A Beach Break in Hell
Sam Raimi may be the world’s greatest raisin soup chef. That’s the term Steven Spielberg coined for his early flop, 1941. A bizarre riff on wartime comedies, it just had too many disparate elements that may be fine apart but shouldn’t go together – kind of like raisin soup. It’s almost impossible to get the…
Return to Silent Hill Review: Sequel Speedruns the Superior Original
How often does a filmmaker get to make a sequel to a 20-year-old film? In 2006, Christophe Gans directed Silent Hill, an adaptation of the smash hit survival horror game from Japanese publisher Konami. Now he returns to grimy supernatural terror with stand-alone sequel Return to Silent Hill. For the first film, Gans understood what…
H Is for Hawk Review: Birds of a Feather
You don’t have to wait long to get to a hawk – the opening credits kick off with marvelous close-ups on feathers and taut muscles – but it takes a while to meet Mabel, the goshawk at the center of Helen Macdonald’s 2014 memoir, adapted here by director Philippa Lowthorpe and Emma Donoghue (Room). Claire…
In Cold Light Review: On the Run From Family
If your vision of Canada is all moose, maple syrup, and ice hockey, Alberta is the place that may disabuse you of that notion. It’s basically the Texas Panhandle. It’s Southern Oklahoma. It’s cattle and oil and cowboy hats and junkies and dealers and petty crimes and rodeos. It’s where Ava (Maika Monroe, Longlegs, It…
Mercy Review: Guilty of Being Stupid
At a time when AI is being rammed into every aspect of our lives, we deserve a film that will deal with the real ethical and legal quandaries raised by letting LLMs into the courtroom. Instead, what we get is Mercy, a film so dull, doltish, and off-putting that it can only be described as…
The Choral Review: The Song of a War-Torn Community
The devastation of war is not simply on the battlefield. The idea of the home front may summon ideas of home fires burning, but at its worst it’s a subtle devastation. Take Great Britain during World War I. A generation of young men was butchered in the trenches, and the only people left behind were…
The Testament of Ann Lee Review: This Musical Biography May Be the Weirdest Movie You’ll See This Year
The Testament of Ann Lee, a biographical musical about the woman who founded the Shaker movement in America, is a confounding film that fascinates and exhausts in equal measure. There’s really nothing quite like it out there. Amanda Seyfried plays the titular Ann Lee, an 18th century, deeply devout woman who joined the “Shaking Quakers”…
Night Patrol Review: Bloodsuckers of LAPD
These days, it’s really feeling like law enforcement is a bloodthirsty parasite on America’s communities. In ghetto horror Night Patrol, that suspicion is quite literal, as the titular Night Patrol LAPD special unit is actually a bunch of vampires. That’s the story that Wazi (RJ Cyler) lays out when he’s arrested with a giant piece…
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