“Could I ask you something? Are you together?” That seemingly innocuous question—asked with what seems to be genuine, non-judgmental curiosity—sets off a heartbreaking conflagration in Close, the second feature co-written (with Angelo Tijssens) and directed by Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont. The scene is a school cafeteria at lunchtime, and the question is posed by a […]
Carla Simón’s sophomore feature, Alcarràs, opens in a way that closely resembles her promising if somewhat amorphous debut, 2017’s Summer 1993. That film, as its title suggests, constituted a cine-memoir minutely recreating Simón’s childhood in northern Catalonia (an autonomous region of Spain), and she stuck firmly to a kid’s-eye view throughout. Alcarràs initially seems to […]
The twin theses of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon are that A) something indescribable and precious was lost when filmmaking transitioned to sound in the late 1920s, and the art form is worse off for it; and B) the Hollywood film industry is a brutally exploitative place that gathers emotionally broken people all together so they can […]
Offscreen space can be an effective tool in movies of all kinds, but horror, more than any other genre, benefits from the suggestion that something terrible may be lurking just beyond the frame’s border. What we can’t see, and thus have to conjure in our imagination, often proves scarier than any razor-toothed monster or hatchet-wielding […]
For the U.S. film industry to have produced a knockoff of Child’s Play retooled to make the observation, “huh, did you know that there are dolls connected to the internet these days? What won’t they think of next” that is actually a good and watchable movie counts as a small miracle. For it to have produced […]
The last time Blumhouse created a modernized slasher-thriller that they released exclusively on Peacock, it was the underwhelming and grating They/Them, so it wasn’t exactly impossible for them to raise the bar with Sick, which dropped on the streaming service this Friday the 13th. They even had Scream scribe Kevin Williamson on hand, working together […]
Nobody gets anywhere near a high school prom in Corsage, a European co-production that’s primarily Austrian (that’s where its writer-director, Marie Kreutzer, hails from) but has strategically been given a French title certain to confuse American viewers. Why we decided to shift the word’s meaning to “garish flower arrangement clumsily pinned to a young lady’s […]
We’re living through a golden age of “the rich are evil and out of touch, and must be destroyed!” pop culture objects being made by people who are, themselves, extremely rich and out of touch, and are acting (one suspects) less out of a place of good honest class betrayal than a neurotic need to […]
I love the horror genre. Where else are you going to get a minor classic Jamie Lee Curtis slasher (Terror Train 1980) halfheartedly remade two and a half decades later (Train 2008) before actually being remade almost word for word by Tubi another decade and a half later (Terror Train 2022), at which point it […]
There’s always something fascinating and strange about when an established film property is given new life as a stage musical and that musical eventually wends its way back to the screen. We’re here to talk Matilda the Musical (with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and book by Dennis Kelly, also on screenwriting duty) so obviously […]
Athena is representative of a trend in contemporary French cinema that I like to call banlieue porn, films taking place in Paris’ poorer, darker suburbs (les banlieues) and focusing on the lives of crime and violence that their predominantly young, immigrant, and Muslim population purportedly faces every day. Such films walk a fine line between […]
