Old suffers a bit from Shyamalan’s weaknesses as a writer, but by its end, ranks as one of the director’s weirdest and most poignant works yet. If there’s a single unifying force behind the films of M. Night Shyamalan, it’s their outright insistence upon requiring…
During an interview with Jump Cut in 1976, director Monte Hellman described Two-Lane Blacktop as such: “It’s a film about inner life rather than outer life. But it’s not a film about other films; it’s not a pastiche.” The final caveat was in relation…
Against all odds, Family Business manages to be a wild, engaging sequel to the interminable original Boss Baby. Dreamworks Animation has always shown a penchant for producing would-be “edgy” family fare, the kinds of films that work overtime in presenting as kid-centric in their storytelling while…
The Forever Purge is suitably cynical and cathartic effort, righting some of the series’ previous wrongs and more bluntly tackling America’s systemic evils. Since James DeMonaco’s first film, The Purge series has found success in increasingly foregrounding its ideological concerns with each successive effort, making…
F9 continues the franchise’s downward trend, further garbling its outsized action and sentimentality into confectionery pap. What started as a scrappy gearhead ripoff of Point Break in 2001’s The Fast and the Furious has now become a lumbering, endless Saturday morning cartoon in F9: The…
Spike Lee’s 1991 Jungle Fever, a work with a title and subject matter seemingly designed to court — indeed, demand — controversy, is at its core a study of extreme contrasts. While Lee has been accused of a great many things during his four-decade…
Episode Description: This week, we take on 1984’s Streets of Fire, directed by Walter Hill, a film that opens by helpfully describing itself as a “A Rock & Roll Fable.” Without the guidance, it would be hard to know the most appropriate way to…
Once seen as a tragic fall from grace, today it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to hear someone sing the praises of the movies Francis Ford Coppola made in the 1980s. Starting with One From The Heart in ’81, the maverick director…
Episode Description: This week, the fountain of youth wreaks havoc on the lives of Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis, and Goldie Hawn in 1992’s dark comedy Death Becomes Her, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Streep plays a vain, aging actress trapped in a loveless marriage who…
Nobody is an absolute blast of genre filmmaking and T-fueled ass-kicking glee. By now, it’s not really a stretch to assume that Bob Odenkirk isn’t just a terrific comedian, but also a gifted dramatic actor (see The Post, or, duh, Better Call Saul). That reality…
