The cabin in the woods: as reliable a setup as there is in all of horror. The isolation of new lovers leaving the world and a sense of security behind to focus exclusively on one another only to find themselves overcome by evil external forces (or one another);…
“What’s a pretty girl like you,” asks Don King, the all-time boxing promoter played by Chad L. Coleman, “doing getting punched in the face?” Christy isn’t just a star vehicle for Sydney Sweeney —it’s a chance to prove her toughness, perhaps her mettle as a method actor. “Because…
During my short self-directed crash course on Argentine cinema last month, I was surprised how little had been written in English on the subject. There are specialty studies, especially regarding the country’s golden era of noir filmmaking, but certainly no one-stop shop for the merely curious. My own…
There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A boat launched in the West Sea could not make port in the East, nor could a boat launched in the East Sea make…
The themes of time and guilt are ribboned together in Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, a modest yet sweeping period drama set in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century. Based on a Denis Johnson novella, the film chronicles a fictional — although clearly meant to…
“Baahubali!” The name rings out like music. Maybe you’ve heard it before, or maybe you haven’t, but the song sounds sweet just the same. S.S. Rajamouli’s Baahubali is back: sliced, diced, and repackaged as a single film. A two-part box office behemoth in India —The Conclusion remains the…
Justin Lin, once at the helm of the Fast & Furious franchise — including entries four through six, as well as two and nine — has made a change with the peculiar, personal Last Days. His latest backtracks through the life of John Allen Chau, a young, zealous…
Karim Leklou has a fascinating face, a seemingly unremarkable assemblage of features that acts like a blank slate; it’s a Kuleshov-effect visage. Director Clément Cogitore put this phenomenon to great use in last year’s Sons of Ramses, an as-yet-undistributed sorta-thriller that cast Leklou as a fake medium who…
Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he lay claim to his heritage? This sprawling three-hour epic opens with a parade of A.I.-generated Vlad the Impalers telling us to suck their cocks.…
Desolate, grim, and hopelessly introverted, The Boss’s album Nebraska captures a slice of America that’s as caustic and fresh today as it was in 1981. You put it on, and you’re there: sipping a Miller Lite in a lonely roadhouse, trawling a boardwalk in the dead of night,…
Exactly how does one go about commencing a review for something titled Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc? Some useful context is in order: Chainsaw Man began life as a (still-running) manga series created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, with the first volume originally published in 2018. The series…
It’s been a quarter century since The Blair Witch Project first terrorized unsuspecting audiences. In the ensuing years, it’s been difficult to find much innovation in the found footage subgenre. More often a clearing house for cheap streaming filler or a quick, no-frills calling card for ambitious young…
This evening, like every evening, you settle in to listen to a song from Cole Porter’s songbook. There is nothing like the sharp lash of Cole Porter that assures one of American ingenuity. There is nothing like the affirmation of Cole Porter that reminds you that it is…
1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is B-movie perfection, a secretly elegant story of women in competition that satirizes both maternity and sorority. And on top of that, the film gives viewers a diabolically great performance from Rebecca De Mornay as its villain, a woman out for…
Die, My Love There comes a tale from an antique land. A King ruled over a thin Isthmus, above and below which were two unfathomably large continents. A boat launched in the West Sea could not make port in the East, nor could a boat launched in the…
Troubled souls trapped: the parameters of a typical Claire Denis narrative are rarely complex. Beau Travail’s French Foreign Legion soldiers were confined to their base in Djibouti, High Life’s condemned criminals to their spacecraft, and The Fence’s action occurs almost entirely on a construction site, in an unspecified…
Hamnet A single work of art may, or may not, be able to change the world, but it can surely change a mind. To those unfamiliar with the plot of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, about William Shakespeare, his wife Agnes, and the death of their titular son,…
I Know This Much is True is the 2020s best work of narrative art so far, unjustly buried by its just-exactly-wrong release over the course of six weeks in the spring following the onset of COVID-19. It was the latest in Derek Cianfrance’s cycle of kitchen sink miserabilist…
Based on the life of acclaimed 20th century lyricist Lorenz Hart, Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon has as much in common with one of the filmmaker’s scrappy, discursive gab-fests as it does a conventional biopic. Almost entirely confined to a tavern location, presented mostly in real-time and starring the…
Is This Thing On? Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer, and now a standup comedian in his work. His latest, Is This Thing On? — a film brought to…