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 »
MEGALOPOLIS
It feels like the right thing to do when reviewing MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE is to wait for the director’s cut. It’s an impulse as fractured as the film itself considering that Francis Ford Coppola sank his own money into making this film and thereby had final cut. Still, for all the disjointed execution this frustrating… Read More »
INFINITY POOL
With INFINITY POOL Brandon Cronenberg continues his father’s great tradition of unsettling images and quasi-familiar realities. He diverges in that, for all the normalization of the disquieting, in that he fails to evince the same undertone impish glee at the macabre so evident in even the elder Mr. Cronenberg’s darkest works. Still, he… Read More »
MEMORY
Based on the delightfully quirky 2003 Belgian film, The Memory of a Killer, MEMORY has the makings of a solid neo-noir. Alas, rather than a tight script to match its excellent visual acuity, MEMORY rambles too much before leading us down the familiar path of corruption in high places and the loss of innocence across… Read More »
COPSHOP
Click here for the flashback interview with Joe Carnahan and Frank Grillo for THE GREY. There has rarely been such an effusive, even whimsical, satire on violence as that which is found in Joe Carnahan’s COPSHOP. This blackest of black comedies adroitly combines tension and goofiness with an insouciance that is nothing short of breathtaking.… Read More »
REMINISCENCE
There is a persistent torpor to REMINISCENCE, a film that tries to be many things and fails for the most part. Rife with visuals that evoke a disquieting dreamlike state, the story, an ersatz neo-noir set mostly between sunset and sunrise, drones along with the cinematic equivalent of a mosquito’s interminable buzz on a humid… Read More »
I AM LISA
One can approach I AM LISA as a very cool horror film in which the power structure is challenged by the supernatural. One can also approach it as a scathingly brilliant dialectic on feminism in several of its waves. Either way one comes away from this deliciously atmospheric, intellectually nimble excursion into lycanthropy, wildly entertained… Read More »
SPUTNIK
As is traditional in one of the more intriguing sub-genres of speculative fiction, the most dangerous monsters of SPUTNIK turn out to be the ones that didn’t come from outer space. That is the only standard trope to be found in this lean and lyric film from Russia, though, as it takes a sober look… Read More »
STONEWALL
STONEWALL is a sudsy, underwritten, overwrought effort that is less than the intended tribute to the unsung heroes of the eponymous riots that accelerated the gay liberation movement into the social mainstream. Instead, it is a melodrama of truly epic proportions told with every cliché of gay life as lived in less enlightened times, and with… Read More »
THE GREEN INFERNO
With an Eli Roth film, one should know what one is getting into, as in, an unspeakably unsettling film that will feature violence, gore, and a side of human nature that does not show the species off to its best advantage.