Bones and All, the seventh feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino, is kind of about cannibalism, and this is where it gets itself into trouble. No film should be “kind of” about cannibalism. Some subjects just don’t allow for half measures. You should never walk out of a film whose protagonists are cannibals – bisexual […]
Clint Eastwood, all 91 years of him, has been at the “what if this is his very last film?” stage of his directorial career at least since 2008’s Gran Torino, ten whole movies ago. That was also the first of his “well, even if he keeps directing, you can definitely tell that he’s retiring from […]
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 […]
Joanna Hogg is one of the most interesting working directors that you most likely haven’t heard of. In the four features she’s made, starting Unrelated in 2007, she’s carved out a very peculiar but rewarding niche of crafting sedate character dramas after the fashion of Éric Rohmer, but charged with the kind of overwhelming Englishness […]
The one good thing about living in some godforsaken quadrant of the country where the luscious awards-season heavy hitter Call Me by Your Name took forever and then some to open is that, by the time I had my chance to catch up with it, it had already moved from “rapturous praise” to “mild backlash”, […]
Ordinarily, the fun challenge of reviewing a highly fucked-up movie that does things movies tend not to is to figure out how to describe it in a way that sounds appealing. The Lure has already taken care of that. This is a Polish musical-horror film set in a tacky disco/strip club in the 1980s – […]
Watching Prince Avalanche, it’s not difficult to feel like it’s Christmas morning, and you got almost the present you wanted. I mean, it’s still really great, and you’re glad to have it but… it’s just not right, and the harder you insist that it’s still really good, the harder it becomes to ignore how disappointing […]
Every week this 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 one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: though it’s technically a remake, what strikes me about Sparkle is its affinity with a much more recent film, […]
Not since the glorious Halloween devolved into the insipid Halloween II three decades ago has a horror franchise managed to squander all of its early potential in quite as few steps as the Paranormal Activity movies: Oren Peli’s 2009 original* was a simple machine perfectly-designed to be as scary as it possibly could; 2010′ Paranormal […]
Let Me In is the best English-language vampire movie in ages. Ages. That must not be denied (though with competition like Twilight, we must ask ourselves: is it that big of an achievement). If it suffers, it is only because of 2008’s Let the Right One In, the best vampire film, irrespective of language (it’s […]
I would not want to be responsible for writing the screen story for the title Hot Tub Time Machine. There are certain ideas which are so awesomely stupid-amazing that no matter what, the execution cannot possibly match the film that the viewer will dream up just upon learning of the project. Recall Snakes on a […]
There is but one thing more annoying than wanting very much to love a movie, only to find out that it kind of sucks: wanting very much to hate a movie, only to find out that it’s pretty good. Other than its atrociously over-compensatory subtitle, Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire is at […]
