A Quiet Place is the sort of film that doesn’t leave nearly enough buttons unbuttoned and loose ends unknotted that you would assume it had to have a sequel, while also leaving enough room for a sequel that it would never feel like they were forcing one out just for the sake of business. And […]
Intermittently throughout the summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to a major new release. This week: Netflix has commissioned a new zombie movie, Army of the Dead, from slow-motion enthusiast Zack Snyder. There could be no better […]
“Movies are so rarely great art,” Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, “that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.” I do not agree with much of what Kael had to say over the years, and in fact I do not even agree with large swaths of […]
It’s not literally the case that every single anthology film that has ever been made has one segment that threatens to seriously undo all the good work done by the rest of them, but it feels that way sometime. And There Is No Evil, the Golden Bear winner at the 2020 Berlinale, makes things extra […]
It is very easy to root for a movie like Those Who Wish Me Dead: a curt thriller that focuses all of its stakes on seven human beings in a mostly constrained period and space, serious in tone without going up its own ass about it, built around a proper movie star, and best of […]
When confronted with a story as vigorously trashy as the one underlying The Woman in the Window – adapted from the 2018 novel by A.J. Finn, the pen name of Daniel Mallory, a book editor who very openly described how the book came about as a compendium of every trope in popular post-Gone Girl crime […]
The worst thing we can say about Oxygen is that it is a very gimmicky thriller based on an overfamiliar gimmick, but done by a director with a skill set extremely well-positioned to make the most of that gimmick, and starring an actor who wrings everything she possibly out of basically only three elements (her […]
In the early parts of Mainstream, it appears that producer, director, and co-writer (with Tom Stuart) Gia Coppola was really anxious to make her own version of Aunt Sofia’s The Bling Ring. It is not very good at this, and also, by the time the film’s glacially-paced 94 minutes are over, this will seem like the […]
In the winter 2021 model Liam Neeson Action Thriller, The Marksman, Neeson plays a character named Jim Hanson, and this distracted me enough that I’m suppose it would have been a huge bother even if the film was better. Or also if it was worse. The point is, Jim Hanson is just, I’m sorry, an […]
There is very little inherently interesting about Things Heard & Seen, a movie about which the strongest emotional response I have had is frustration at the almost gravitational pull that I have towards typing out the title as Things Seen & Heard, having to bodily force myself on the right track every time. Or that […]
The opening sequence of Stowaway, a new science fiction thriller by director Joe Penna that’s much heavier on the “science” than “thriller”, is a top-notch bit of space travel filmmaking that calls to mind all the best examples of the form from Apollo 13 to First Man; the last sequence is ginned-up sentimental horseshit that […]
Just explaining the concept of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets potentially constitutes a spoiler to the sufficiently way reader, so I guess the best way to start is to say: if you are a lover of human beings, this is a film for you. And if there is any shred of justice in this world, filmmaking […]
