Park Chan-wook received the Best Director prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and though I’ve only seen, at this writing, five of the 21 features that screened in Competition, it’s hard to imagine that Vincent Lindon’s jury (which included Asghar Farhadi, Rebecca Hall, Joachim Trier, and Jeff Nichols, among others) didn’t make the correct […]
Yeah, you read that right. Spirit Halloween: The Movie is a branding exercise in repping the spookiness of America’s favorite way to temporarily fill abandoned storefronts Halloween superstore. Produced in conjunction with three studios you’ve never heard of, Spirit Halloween has taken the world by storm. And by “the world,” I mean “limited theaters and VOD where […]
In the seventh century, at the dawn of the Tang dynasty, the monk Xuanzang made a fateful journey from his native China to India to recover—and then translate—an extensive collection of Buddhist scriptures. His voyage, recorded in a contemporary travel narrative, became the basis of Wu Cheng’en’s fantastical sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, where […]
Being one of the best Hellraiser films released since 1988 is such a non-achievement that it’s a little discouraging that I can’t bring myself to say that the eleventh film in the series, simply titled Hellraiser, isn’t better than “one of” the best in that time span. This attempt by screenwriters Ben Collins & Luke […]
Hollywood has been battling nightmarish politics with goofy antics for just about as long as cinema has existed. Hell, even the Third Reich inspired its share of comedy classics—not merely decades later (as in, say, The Producers’ deliberately ludicrous “Springtime for Hitler” production number), but while World War II was still very much in progress. […]
If all you know about heavy metal icon Rob Zombie is his directorial filmography, you would still have absolutely no doubt that here is a man who adores horror cinema. His first seven theatrical features all have the unmistakable energy of somebody who has seen all the movies and knows them inside and out, and […]
I’ll say this for Hocus Pocus 2: it isn’t simply Hocus Pocus a second time, despite appearances. Are there similarities? Of course. For one, the setup is near-identical: the Sanderson sisters, an infamous trio of witches from Salem, Massachusetts, return to the world of the living on a Halloween night, thanks to the lighting of […]
Mathieu Amalric has spent the past three decades forging a career that American moviegoers have experienced in concentrically different subsets. For the widest circle, he was the memorably odd villain in Quantum of Solace, and has occasionally played small supporting roles in Wes Anderson films (The Grand Budapest Hotel; The French Dispatch of the Liberty, […]
How does it feel to be living through history, folks? You see, Bros is THE FIRST GAY MOVIE!!!!! with an all-queer main cast (sorry, Love, Simon) from a major studio (sorry, Fire Island and the entire New Queer Cinema movement of the 1990s). Plus whatever other qualifications are necessary to announce that this tale of cis […]
There are films for which the “here’s what this reminded me of” game can lead to some very strained and convoluted comparisons that make no sense to anyone, not even the person making them. This is not the case with Smile, which could not be more straightforwardly the film that happens when It Follows and […]
