“All of you people living in this little world of judgement and paranoia and mistrust,” rants Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway) to her family. “I can feel it every second.” It’s a statement made with a staggering lack of self-awareness, but that’s the Buchman clan’s stock in trade, whether it’s Kym’s hair-trigger ...
2025-11-18 07:10:05 +0000 UTC View PostIt was on their tenth day in the desert that Slava spotted the horseman. The sun was past its zenith and the column was strung out across the shifting sands, their shadows stretching for what seemed like miles. Slava, half-dazed by the heat, turned to follow the progress of a vulture circling in the distance, shading her eyes...
2025-11-13 01:35:52 +0000 UTC View PostThe dragonfly rose up from the palace’s windyard in a dizzying rush, the roar of its wings like a hurricane to either side of Rupa where she sat behind her mistress in the howdah. Ahead, past Sima’s other two handmaidens, three Scorpion Guards, her midwife, and her soothsayer, Sahar Soyu, the pilot sat bent low ove...
2025-11-11 03:07:25 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s nice to be reminded that Oscar Isaac can act. After years of sleepwalking through airless franchise crap, here he is throwing himself into a project he obviously cares deeply about. His incarnation of Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s infamous death-obsessed scientist, is tightly wound and rigorously unselfaware, h...
2025-11-09 07:24:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Yorgos Lanthimos uses whimsy more effectively than perhaps any other working director. In Bugonia, his latest feature, he keeps that particular knife hidden for a long, long time, but when it finally comes out, he buries it right to the hilt. The disarming sight of the Andromedans in their bulky, braided costumes, wh...
2025-11-08 03:35:35 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s such a treat to watch a director grow and mature in real time. The thematic fixations that made director Michelle Garza Cervera’s debut feature, La Huesera, so captivating are expertly complicated and expanded on in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Folding class into the mix of repressed lesbianism a...
2025-11-01 20:12:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The first thing anyone’s going to think about Silksong is that it’s hard. Gruelingly hard. Punishingly, brutally, relentlessly hard. Rush or fuck up your timing against even the simplest enemies and the game won’t just rap your knuckles, it’ll break your fingers. Taking a boss on the first try happened to me ...
2025-10-16 21:46:38 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a moment in Dead Mail I’ve never really seen in anything else. Uptight, sexually repressed Trent Whittington (John Fleck) speaks over a private audio address system to his kidnapping victim, electronic music technician Josh Ivey (Sterling Macer Jr.), pouring his heart out to the other man in a one-sided m...
2025-10-09 06:04:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I don’t know that I’ve seen a nastier, more brutal ending since The Devil’s Bath. The sight of two well-heeled British aristos cooing over the baby they’ve stolen from a young Black woman, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), who they kept confined for months is so loathsome it feels like snuff footage. Char...
2025-10-07 17:31:34 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a sick-making tension at the heart of Raging Grace, a cruel, twisting sense of precarity, that any single moment could upend everything undocumented housekeeper and care nurse Joy (Max Eigenmann) is working for. Whether it’s employer Katherine’s (Leanne Best) brittle, reactive micromanagement of Joy or ...
2025-10-07 00:28:47 +0000 UTC View Post
As Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, Sean Penn walks like he just got off a horse after a hard day’s ride. He walks like this at all times, as though he’s dismounting a steady stream of horses, one before each scene. He walks like this while held at gunpoint and massively erect. He walks like this with half his face blown off by a ...
2025-09-28 21:22:28 +0000 UTC View Post
Hades II is beautiful. Jen Zee’s much-lauded art direction deserves its roses, imparting a lived-in but rarefied feeling to the game’s mythological settings and characters, as though Alphonse Mucha were going around teaching himself how to utilize chiaroscuro by sketching ruined temples and hidden supernatural wi...
2025-09-26 23:07:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Every new Marvel movie has its wave of critics declaring it either a return to form or a brand new direction for the lumbering pop culture behemoth, and every new Marvel movie, without fail, is pretty much exactly like its predecessors. Fantastic Four: First Steps has a gloss of retro-futuristic 1960s aesthetics, a l...
2025-09-25 03:38:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Director Justin Tipping handles HIM, his feature-length debut, like the unholy love child of a Nike ad and a military recruitment promo reel. Thermal imaged skeletons smash together with concussive force, flesh and viscera quivering within their grayish outlines. We are shoved against Cam Cade’s (Tyriq Withers) scu...
2025-09-18 23:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
For two seasons now, Foundation has been the come-from-behind sensation among all its prestige sci-fi and fantasy ilk, an epic series spanning centuries and effortlessly mixing what feels like half a dozen distinct strains of science fiction — everything from philosophy-heavy meditations on human nature and its con...
2025-09-15 00:33:33 +0000 UTC View Post
For the first forty minutes of its sleek 99-minute running time, Night Moves is more or less a standard noir mystery with a curiously rinky-dink score by composer Michael Small. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a private eye, a former football star with a chip on his shoulder and a marriage on the rocks, the kind of ch...
2025-09-12 20:44:47 +0000 UTC View Post
"We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty... We need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. But I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun de...
2025-09-12 20:20:39 +0000 UTC View PostI try to avoid non-work posts on here, so tomorrow I'll have a review of the classic 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, starring Gene Hackman, and it'll be back to business as usual, but for tonight I just want to take a moment and thank all the new subscribers who've joined today as well as those who have supported my work ...
2025-09-11 22:01:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Every single moment of The Naked Gun, and I mean this in the most complimentary sense, is stupid. Every bit is more moronic than the last, a relentless onslaught of idiocy so overwhelming it feels like getting battered by thirty-foot breakers in a storm at sea. Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) saying “no thanks, I ...
2025-09-02 16:59:17 +0000 UTC View Post
I don’t think anything in Daddy’s Head is poorly done. The performances range from decent (Nathaniel Martello-White as Robert) to unsettlingly raw (the young Rupert Turnbull as Isaac). Director Benjamin Barfoot knows what he’s doing behind the camera, with his disorienting score, and with his spare but deeply u...
2025-08-31 01:54:36 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a particular rhythm to most good Stephen King stories. The intentional layering of small-town tensions. The probing of everyday human failings and foibles, sometimes in pursuit of true monstrosity, sometimes just because, well, that’s what people are like. Weapons, Zach Cregger’s sophomore feature, may ...
2025-08-24 01:42:53 +0000 UTC View Post
If you want a picture of the future, imagine being forced to deepthroat a dildo somehow synthesized from the physical manifestations of the worst experiences of your life — forever. Written by Sam West, Sam Kemmis, Geoff Haggerty (who also directs), Matt Klinman, Chris Sartinsky, and Michael Pielocik, Sex House is ...
2025-08-20 04:41:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Right out of the gate, James Gunn’s reimagining of DC’s iconic Superman (David Corenswet) is big and bold, full of bright colors and frenetic action. The villains are repulsive, self-aggrandizing assholes, the heroes are goofy and sincere, there are hover pods and lasers and women made of nanites and hard-charging reporte...
2025-08-15 17:17:14 +0000 UTC View Post
With her camera, director Athina Rachel Tsangari makes love to the Scottish countryside with the same pagan verve as her protagonist, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), in the film’s opening sequence. A knothole in a dogwood tree becomes a crotch to tongue and finger. Walter’s dirty fingers mold and shape dark soil mixed...
2025-08-12 00:45:39 +0000 UTC View Post
Imagine if Law and Order had ended with detectives Munch and Finn executing a murder/suicide pact with their families in a fleabag motel. Imagine old-fashioned hound dog Lennie Briscoe joining ICE to save his ass from a laundry list of his own pitch-black misdeeds. One day you’re watching a more or less boilerplate...
2025-08-11 02:16:00 +0000 UTC View Post
A thuddingly stupid conceit, underpinning ideas like “humans are tired of seeing dinosaurs” so transparently absurd they derail everything around them, indifferent visual effects, and a severely underbaked script are just a few of the plagues afflicting Rebirth’s sclerotic, half-dead carcass as it shambles thro...
2025-08-07 19:38:14 +0000 UTC View Post
The first time I did mushrooms, I had a vision of an endless sea of flesh, of quivering eyelids, trembling mouths, jiggling fat, thighs clenching and relaxing. An orgasm without a beginning or an end, the whole world shivering apart into unfettered ecstasy. That’s what Together’s nightmarish subterranean spring p...
2025-07-24 06:22:15 +0000 UTC View Post
If you’ve heard one serial killer give a growling monologue about the food chain and apex predators to their victims, you’ve heard them all. It’s too bad no one told Sean Byrne before he directed Dangerous Animals, a movie so transparently cobbled together from a dozen better scripts in the same ballpark that w...
2025-07-22 20:36:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Palm trees sway and whisper in the gusting sea breeze. The dark, full and starless, turns soft light hard and shadows stark. Shot with sometimes unnerving fidelity on a Thomson Viper Filmstream, Miami Vice feels like night on the Florida coast, eerie and empty and vast. There is an immediacy to director Michael Mann...
2025-07-20 18:52:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Here’s a living corpse, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), brain bisected by a hunting knife, nervous system ravaged by COVID, propped up in a motorized wheelchair. He’s the mayor, by default, of a small New Mexico town called Eddington. He has committed, and escaped responsibility for, outrageous crimes. He has survived a shoo...
2025-07-19 04:19:01 +0000 UTC View Post
