scumbelievable

In the Flesh: X

Depictions of the elderly body in horror most often hew toward the decrepit and the horrific, walking memento mori like the nude and aging cultists of Hereditary, the monstrous maternal figures of House of the Devil and Amulet, or The Shining’s ghastly, rotting specter in room 23...

The Deadlights Theater: Yojimbo

Today's first screening of YOJIMBO begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with a second showing tonight at 7pm EST!

The Deadlights Theater: Unforgiven (2013)

Today's screening of UNFORGIVEN begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

I Would Like to See It: The Draughtsman's Contract

A manufactured image, like gossip, has cachet as a form of reality solely by virtue of its existence. The drawings of the Herbert House executed by arrogant young draughtsman R. Neville (Anthony Higgins) are a sort of combination of the two, each one concealing a seemingly innocuous detail in fact composed as part of an elabo...

The Deadlights Theater: Sword of the Stranger

Today's first screening of SWORD OF THE STRANGER begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with a second showing tonight at 7pm EST!

In the Flesh: Master and Commander

I ’m on the sea! I’m on the sea!
I am where I would ever be;
With the blue above, and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe’er I go;
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

The Sea, Bryan Proctor

In the Flesh: Cracks

“I am eyeless in Gaza, betrayed to the Philistines,” sobs girls’ boarding school instructor Ms. Gribben (Eva Green), leaning against her student Di Radfield (Juno Temple). The treachery to which she alludes is her pupil Fiamma’s (Maria Valverde) stated decision to reveal that Gribben raped her while she was intoxicate...

The Deadlights Theater: Lady Snowblood

Today's screening of LADY SNOWBLOOD begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

April: Battle Without Honor or Humanity

For April we're watching samurai movies in the Deadlights Theater!

HARAKIRI
LADY SNOWBLOOD
SWORD OF THE STRANGER
UNFORGIVEN
YOJIMBO
SWORD OF DOOM
SEVEN SAMURAI
13 ASSASSINS

The Deadlights Theater: Harakiri

Today's first screening of HARAKIRI begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, with a second showing tonight at 7pm EST!

In the Flesh: False Positive

Forgive me as I write what is perhaps the most Frasierian sentence of my life, but a professor of mine once posited that when you approach literature through the lens of deconstructionism, you do not remove thematic structure so much as replace it with a structuring absence, like the negative space contained within an archway...

I Would Like to See It: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Few people can do “hapless” like Ben Gazzara, whose features are simultaneously so chiseled and so large that he appears cobbled together from parts in a kit. As dim-witted strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli he has the air of a luckless tertiary Sopranos character given the limelight for a single episode we know from...

I Would Like to See It: Drowning by Numbers

No director has ever made me feel such intense and aching love as has Peter Greenaway, both for the characters and settings of his lushly baroque films and for the medium he has mastered, reinterpreted, and changed via seismic shift for nearly half a century. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without Greenaway there is n...

The Deadlights Theater: Sexy Beast

This afternoon's screening of SEXY BEAST begins at 5pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

The Deadlights Theater: Uncut Gems

Tonight's screening of UNCUT GEMS begins at 9pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

The Deadlights Theater: Dragged Across Concrete

This afternoon's screening of DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE begins at 5pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

I Would Like to See It: The Bad Sleep Well

A man plummets from a seventh story window, pushed not by his enemies but by the verbal urging of his superiors at a large construction firm subsidized by the public as part of the rebuilding of Japan’s national infrastructure. He carries their culpability in a massive bid-rigging scandal all the way down with him, his clot...

The Deadlights Theater: THIEF

Tonight's screening of THIEF begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!

In the Flesh: The Men

There’s a scene in Sandra Newman’s The Men in which an older white woman, realizing she’s alone in a Hispanic neighborhood, feels ashamed by her own racial paranoia and then doubly so for being comforted when a small group of young white girls appears. The book is full of such moments of guiltily defensive self...

I Would Like to See It: Leviathan

Who eats, and who is eaten? Who drinks, and who is drained dry? Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan is preoccupied with such questions of hierarchy and gross exercise of power. The seizure of handyman Kolya’s (Aleksei Serebryakov) land and home by mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the affair between Kolya’s wife Lilya (...

In the Flesh: Unforgiven (2013)

Lee Sang-il's Unforgiven, an adaptation of Clint Eastwood’s classic revisionist Western set in Hokkaido at the start of the Meiji period, begins in the snow. The line between life and death is the edge of a sword, blood drooled from gaping wounds across the powdery white, glimpses of horrific violence held at the s...

In the Flesh: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Here is the dream at the heart of fascism: a room where you can do anything. With violence physical, mental, and economic you push the world to its breaking point, shoving its constituent parts further and further away from one another until no unified structure remains. This absence is the space that you desire, the liminal ...

March: You Son of a Bitch, I'm In

For March we're watching heist flicks in the Deadlights Theater!

JACKIE BROWN
RESERVOIR DOGS
THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1, 2, 3
THIEF
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE
UNCUT GEMS
SEXY BEAST
RIFIFI

Trailer by Vince Renee, @faggy_dyke on Twitter.

Score is 'Windows' off of the Uncut Gems soundtrac...

I Would Like to See It: Martyrs

Tonally, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is one of New French Extremity’s most pronounced oddities. What begins as a grindhouse revenge flick veers into cheesy Saw-esque torture theatrics and ends, after another sharp left turn, in a sort of Twilight Zone chin-scratcher. On a structural level the film�...

I Would Like to See It: In My Skin

Consumption — there’s a loaded word, bridging the gap between the physical act of eating and the more abstracted capitalist act of purchasing goods and services for purposes ranging from comfort to social signaling. In Marina de Van’s In My Skin, the two concepts interpenetrate with slow, sensuous deli...

I Would Like to See It: On the Silver Globe

“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” wrote Marx in his essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. It’s a sentiment which permeates Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe, an unfinished masterpiece revolving at terrifying speeds at the bl...

MANHUNT

A PDF of Manhunt for all patrons at the $10 level and above! I hope you enjoy it <3

In the Flesh: The Power of the Dog

It’s an old story; a man in his prime taking a younger boy, one on the cusp of manhood, under his wing and then into his bed. The Spartans and their boy lovers, the knight and his squire, the Romans with their slaves and puer delicati. On the vast and empty plains of Montana in the year 1925, the men in question ar...

In the Flesh: Rififi

“Hold your balloon tight,” says the nameless father of a nameless child as the pair see little Tonio’s (Dominique Maurin) balloon string cut by a slammed car door. “See what can happen to it?” Rififi poses this same question again and again, driving us to ask ourselves what we want and, more importantly, ho...

I Would Like to See It: Werckmeister Harmonies

Werckmeister Harmonies’ two-hour and twenty-minute running time consists of only 39 shots, most at eye-level, most constantly or near-constantly on the move at paces varying between meandering and brisk. Directed with tremendous restraint and nearly invisible skill by husband and wife team Béla Tarr and �...