It is only fair to give Lee Cronin points for wanting to expand the horizons of what a horror film about a mummy can be, but in LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY, that is pretty much the where originality ends. This overlong and gore-drenched exercise has a slap-dash quality to its writing coupled with putatively intelligent… Read More »
PROJECT HAIL MARY
Every now and then I want to say “Just go see this film” and let the discovery of each revelation be the adventure it was meant to be. PROJECT HAIL MARY, based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, presents that problem. If you want my advice, then suffice to say that this life-and-death… Read More »
PILLION
In PILLION, we learn a great deal about gay biker culture in the UK. This is to be expected in a film wherein a sweet man (Harry Melling) discovers a side of himself he never suspected after falling under the commanding spell of one of those ci-mentioned bikers (Alexander Skarsgård). What is unexpected is discovering… Read More »
SEND HELP
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 »
GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE
It is like cinema has burst forth into the full flower of distinctly new genre, this one about the zeitgeist’s paranoia about AI. Never mind it taking jobs. The very worst it can do is infantilize us into a state of perpetual psychological impotence. The emergence of this genre was a slow build from the… Read More »
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Click here for the flashback interview with Emerald Fennell for SALTBURN. When Emily Bronte published WUTHERING HEIGHTS in 1847, it was hailed for its strangeness, its intensity, and its disquieting disquisition on obsession. Emerald Fennell, she of A PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN and SALTBURN, has taken Brontë’s novel and re-imagined it for modern audiences, recreating the… Read More »
THE MOMENT
THE MOMENT is wise enough to know that the standard for a satire about the music industry has already been set, and any attempts to impinge on SPINAL TAP’s brilliance is a fool’s errand at best. Hence, this deep dive into the Brat Summer of Charlie XCX goes in a different direction, not one that… Read More »
SHELTER
SHELTER is not your typical Jason Statham film. Sure, he’s a one-man demolition squad when it comes to giving the bad guys their comeuppance, but the character is not a caricature nor is he a cardboard cutout spewing quips and taglines. Rather this is a Statham with a quiet presence in stark contrast to the… 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 »