The fruits of entitlement face off with workers controlling the means of production in Sam Raimi’s scathingly brilliant, and wickedly funny, take on gender politics and economic power, SEND HELP. Sure, we’ve seen this scenario before in THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON, SWEPT AWAY (the Wertmuller version, please), and most recently in TRIANGLE OF SADNESS, which owes… Read More »
CRIME 101
Click here for the flashback interview with Bart Layton for AMERICAN ANIMALS. Sometimes an ending can make or break a film. And so it is with CRIME 101, a thoughtful meditation on what happens when following the rules just doesn’t pay off. The payoff to a narrative that could have used some tightening is not… Read More »
NO OTHER CHOICE
NO OTHER CHOICE is a refrain that will echo throughout Park Chan-wook’s film of the same name. It is more than just the desperation of a man fired from his job overseeing the manufacture of specialty papers at a paper mill. That is merely the framework for Park to contemplate the changing economy, the difference… Read More »
MERCY
It’s a classic film noir set-up with just a dash of Hitchcock. A Los Angeles man in the near future awakens from a drunken binge to find that he’s being accused of murder. And not just any murder. No, he’s stabbed his wife a couple of years into a rough patch in their marriage. To… Read More »
GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION
Back in 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and the end of life as we knew it creeping beyond the theoretical, GREENLAND gave us a way to focus our collective anxiety on a civilization ending comet name Clarke and one man’s struggle to save his family. On some level, though, we knew merely getting… Read More »
PRIMATE
Filmmaker Johannes Roberts absolutely understood the assignment with PRIMATE, a film about a pet chimpanzee turned killer. In any film with that premise, the one thing we all expect is to see is the chimp tearing someone’s face off, the which Ben, the chimp in question, does in the first 5 minutes. Once that trope… Read More »
THE HOUSEMAID
Paul Feig has shown an intriguing cinematic progression from BRIDESMAIDS to THE HEAT and then to A SIMPLE FAVOR. A sly penchant, if you will, for films of the noir nature, a penchant that he brings to full fruition with THE HOUSEMAID. In this perfectly executed psychological thriller nothing and no one is quite that… Read More »
DEAD OF WINTER
There is much to admire about Emma Thompson in DEAD OF WINTER, not the least of which is the way she captures the cadence and the spirit of the Minnesota accent with the same effortless skill that embodies the rest of her performance. Virtually silent for most of her time on screen, she is simply… Read More »
CAUGHT STEALING
Many years ago, I interviewed Darren Aronofsky for his maiden effort, PI (a terrific film that should be on everyone’s watchlist). In the course of our conversation about the nexus of Kabbalah and computing, he opined that, as in PI, he wanted to populate his films with, in his words, tough Jews. There are certainly… Read More »
EDDINGTON
Ari Aster’s EDDINGTON will confirm your worst fears and provoke a few new reasons for anxiety about how the world really works. This brilliant use of microcosm as macrocosm is a brutal satire that does not permit the surcease of even nervous laughter or the respite of supernatural forces at work. No, this hell on… Read More »
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