LATEST FILM REVIEWS
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother Review: Faith and Death in the Houston Heat
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is a revisionist revenge film, but not in the fashion of the first and still best John Wick film. Instead, this brooding yet tender drama about faith and violence is revisionist in the same ways that the original Point Blank, Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, and Ghost Dog: The Way of…
Beware Boiúna Review: Snake With No Bite and No Brain
Mike P. Nelson hasn’t only directed soft reboots of established horror franchises, but it’s definitely become his stock-in-trade. First there was his abysmal relaunch of the redneck cannibal Wrong Turn franchise as some kind of half-witted conspiracy flick. He followed this up with his re-envisioning of Silent Night, Deadly Night, which welded together the Christmas…
The History of Concrete Review: Who Is John Wilson?
Bless John Wilson, who will puncture his ego faster than anybody else could possibly get to it. Creator and star of How to With John Wilson, the COVID-era HBO docuseries, Wilson knows he’s not exactly a household name. So, early in his debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, he helpfully summarizes his backstory via…
Digger Review: Best Buried Deep and Forgotten
Ever heard that old saying, this meeting could have been an email? Similarly, rather than being a film, Digger could have been a burning bag of dog poop delivered to Adam McKay’s doorstep. A seeming broadside at heavy-handed Hollywood advocacy flops like Don’t Look Up, it’s a scathing pastiche of everything that makes such movies…
Fantastic Fest Review: Wild Horse Nine’s Hitmen on Holiday
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two hitmen comically bicker and philosophize while nestled away in a strangely unfamiliar and out-of-the-way setting. Narratively, Martin McDonagh’s latest film, Wild Horse Nine, could be the flip side to his 2008 film In Bruges. Both films are pure fiction anchored by unforgettable performances and mordantly whip-smart…
Primetime Review: The Evil That Men Do
Primetime, like the early 2000s TV show To Catch a Predator that this film lays bare, is in turn icky, undaunted, questionable, and compellingly watchable. Documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim (Ren Faire, Some Kind of Heaven) makes his narrative feature debut with Primetime, a film based on real events that thrusts newsman Chris Hansen’s hidden-camera show…
Fantastic Fest Review: Victorian Psycho
Winifred Notty is the sanest person she has ever met. This must be true, because she says it to herself so often. And clearly one would require the sanest person alive as the governess for two children at a manor house in 19th century Yorkshire. The idea of the well-balanced young lady of lower social…
Fantastic Fest Review: DogGod
In this long-banned Thai film from 1998, a group of men and women literally worship a mongrel dog in their ashram. They dress the animal in a monk’s robe and floral wreaths, and carry it around on a pillow. It’s easy to see why more than 25 years ago the Thai powers-that-were regarded the DogGod’s…
Fantastic Fest Review: What Happened to Doris?
For the last decade and a half, audiences have endured The Conjuring films, big-budget propaganda for infamous self-proclaimed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren. Always purportedly based on real stories, those films ignore that the cases that the notorious scam artists inserted themselves into involved real people who were going through something horrifying. Whether you believe…
Fantastic Fest Review: The Cycle
No one expected the director of the profoundly silly ThanksKilling to create The Head Hunter, a profound meditation on grief and violence wrapped up inside a monster movie. In the intervening eight years since that shocking change of direction, filmmaker Jordan Downey added a particularly stomach-churning and weird installment for V/H/S: Beyond, and now returns…
Fantastic Fest Review: The Glorious Dead
There’s a certain cadence to the films of the Adams Family. Not that they’re predictable. It’s that, even after a run as genre favorites and festival favorites since their 2019 breakout, The Deeper You Dig, their films are instantly recognizable. There’s a certain lived-in griminess, a real-world bleakness balanced against wily intellect and magickal instincts,…
Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger Review: It’s Not Just Rock & Roll
Fathers and sons united in song. Girlfriends hugging and crying. A lone lad standing post-show, red-faced and awestruck, as a stadium of 80,000 begins to clear out. In a sea of Adidas bucket hats and pints of Guinness, these are the images memorialized, with dramatic flair and vibrant color, in Oasis: Don’t Look Back in…
Hope Review: A Monstrous Waste of Potential
As a critic, I long ago accepted that which films do and do not get a theatrical release is a decision process that lies far above my pay grade and I will only suffer sleepless nights if I ponder them too long. These enigmas are doubly murky when it comes to the seemingly arbitrary path…
Onslaught Review: Pervy Sex and Bloody Death
Long before Adam Wingard became the guy who made box office eye candy like the Godzilla films, he made a little hallucinatory horror called Pop Skull about junkies in Alabama. It’s a skeezy, depraved little nightmare, and if you’ve been wondering where that Adam Wingard has been for the last few years, then it’s safe…
Dear You Review: Identity and Integration in a Hidden Family History
Chinese historical drama Dear You’s original title translates more accurately to Love Letters to Grandma. Yet it’s been a long time since Iap Sogriu (Wu Shaoqing) has received that kind of mail. Instead, Lamgi – or Ama, as her grandson, Hiou-ui (Zheng Runqi), calls her – has quietly raised her family and tended olive trees…
The Sun Never Sets Review: A Love Triangle in the Land of the Midnight Sun
In the first half of his career, as a foundational member of the mumblecore movement, Joe Swanberg was making at least a movie a year – a galloping clip of funny, provocative, scruffy works by and large about people acting like idiots. But the pace got to be too much, burning out fans like myself who…
Colony Review: The Next Evolution of the Zombie Film
South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho doesn’t just make zombie films, but they’re the part of his filmography that has made the biggest international impact. His debut feature, Train to Busan, and its animated prequel, Seoul Station, and live-action sequel, Peninsula, established his reputation as a horror director. Now he’s returned to the genre with Colony,…
Late Fame Review: The Old Guy’s Still Got It
Given Coyote vs. Acme’s tortured history (that Warner Bros. Discovery anvil drop) and Late Fame’s winding festival flight path, it’s unlikely the two films’ shared screenwriter, Samy Burch (May December) anticipated them both arriving in movie theatres at the same time. Could you get much further apart in terms of tone and content? Maybe not,…
It Ends Review: The Road to Nowhere May Lead to Enlightenment
There’s a Zen koan about a monk, hanging off a cliffside on a vine being chewed by mice, with a tiger above him and one below. In the middle of this peril, he sees a wild strawberry, plucks it, eats it, and announces to no one in particular, “Ah, how sweet!” Like all koans, it’s…
Coyote vs. Acme Review: When Cartoons Take Corporations to Court
Between their hilarious debut in 1949’s “Fast and Furry-ous” and the end of their golden era run in 1966 with “Sugar and Spies,” Warner Bros. released 40 animated shorts featuring the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. That the modern incarnation of the studio famously tried to bury their first feature-length collaboration, Coyote vs. Acme,…
Idiots Review: The Curse and Comedy of Self-Deception
“Are you familiar with the philosophy that everyone, everywhere is always doing the best that they are able to in that given moment?” If seemingly irredeemable but ultimately harmless scumbag Mark (Dave Franco) is right when he muses this thought to a motel manager, then he’s in real trouble because his best is not that…
The Dog Stars Review: The End of the World, Again
The most generic post-apocalyptic plotline imaginable can be boiled down to “isolated hero leaves his fortress of solitude, sets off in search of some magical place where the old world survives, and discovers that the real civilization is the friends he made along the way.” The Dogs Stars, director Ridley Scott’s film of the 2012…
Romería Review: Surfacing the Past
Spanish filmmaker Carla Simón’s Romería opens on the ocean, shot grainily on a lo-def camcorder, with a woman’s voiceover describing the different temperaments of the water. The footage is captured by the film’s protagonist Marina in the year 2004, and the words are from her mother’s 1980s diary – adapted from real-life letters written by…
Insidious: Out of the Further Review: Time to Close the Door
Imagine a Halloween haunted house. The first year you go, everything is new and exciting and every scare is fresh. The second year is fun in a different way, as you kind of know what’s going to happen but this time you can look for what’s new and appreciate the experience a little more. Now…
The Magic Faraway Tree Review: The Family That Adventures Together…
Kids on both sides of the pond already went nuts for the Paddington pictures and Wonka, both sourced from beloved British children’s books. With The Magic Faraway Tree, writer and performer Simon Farnaby (The Mighty Boosh, Ghosts) tries his hand at a third British children’s lit classic. Based on an Enid Blyton series first launched…
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