Ryan Coogler has a great deal he wants to say in SINNERS, so much in fact that one genre would not be adequate to cover it all. Hence his treatise on the evils of racism and the oppression of religion encompasses an epic of magical realism that leaps off the screen with its boundless energy… Read More »
NOSFERATU
David Eggers, who has a vision of such specific originality and clarity that it might well become a horror subgenre at some point, has taken on not just one iconic film in NOSFERATU, but two, both of whose imagery have become part of the cultural landscape even for those who have never seen NOSFERATU (1922)… Read More »
HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA: TRANSFORMANIA
HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA: TRANSFORMANIA is a relentlessly obvious and overplayed exercise in draining the last dregs from a moribund franchise. Let me put it this way. Adam Sandler, not known for discriminating taste in projects, took a pass on this material that continues the saga of Drac, the vampiric proprietor of the titular establishment that caters… Read More »
THE BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL
There is an air of Celtic melancholy running through the, ahem, deadpan humor of THE BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL. That touch elevates the, further ahem, stakes in this horror comedy that takes a few swipes at fraught family relationships, a sinking economy, and Bram Stoker’s relevance when a real vampire resurfaces. The supernatural is almost… Read More »
VAN HELSING
VAN HELSING is a film that does not do things by halves. One might, in principle, admire the way it pulls out all the stops early on, but the results, a hemorrhaging husk that eventually dissolves into the same sort of dust as the staked vampires that people its running time, prevents admiring it in… Read More »
Robert Pattinson Enters the TWILIGHT
When I talked with Robert Pattinson on November 10, 2008, about playing Edward, the hunky vampire in TWILIGHT, that film had just sold out around 100 of its first screenings almost two weeks before its opening. He modestly refused to take any personal credit for that, even though he had been mobbed more than once… Read More »