LATEST FILM REVIEWS
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…
All You Need Is Kill Review: The Same Story Again, But Different
Time loop dramas are never really about temporal mechanics. Instead, they’re about the growth of the characters who realize they are the only ones who know their lives are on repeat. What differentiates them is the MacGuffin that induces repetition: a cave in Palm Springs, Cthulhoid abominations in The Endless, a groundhog (maybe?) in Groundhog…
The Voice of Hind Rajab Review: Come and Hear
The greatest horror of the modern era is to normalize atrocity. It’s to look at what is going on around us, shrug, and think that’s acceptable. It’s dehumanizing and callous and opens the door to acceptance of worse crimes. But then there are those for whom contending with atrocity is a burden. Those for whom…
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Review: End of the Old, Birth of the New
Since the massive success of revisionist not-a-zombie zombie flick 28 Days Later in 2002, the franchise has always been fundamentally disinterested in the infected themselves, having added little to their nature since the original idea of them being driven by rage rather than hunger. As the fourth film overall and second in the ongoing new…
Dead Man’s Wire Review: A Debt to History
What responsibility does a filmmaker owe to the past? It’s a complicated question, balancing historical accuracy with the needs of narrative. Recently, Hamnet played against what little we truly know about the Shakespeares and got a big pass because 16th century Stratford-upon-Avon is so long ago and so far away. Conversely, that means the closer…
Resurrection Review: To Sleep, Perchance to Make Movies
It’s been said that a film is merely a dream captured in celluloid, and if so then the nighttime visions that dance through the head of Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan must be too vibrant to contain within one man. They have spilled out into the worlds of Resurrection, a cavalcade of strange images that take…
The Plague Review: Childhood’s End
Few works of art have debunked the idea of childhood innocence as harshly as 1954’s Lord of the Flies, and what makes it such an important work of fiction is its astuteness. Take away the island setting and the shadow of nuclear war and what author William Golding really placed under an uncomfortably powerful microscope…
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