Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, from 1986, is the filmmaking equivalent to being shot in the gut and kicked into a pool of sewage to bleed out. That’s not a pullquote you should hope to see on any future home video releases, but I mean it in the most earnest, admiring way possible. There […]
A review requested by Andy Stout, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. A film like Martyrs has to exist, and I’m glad it does. That is not the same thing as being glad I’ve personally seen it, and it sure as bloody hell isn’t the same thing as […]
I know the internet has decided that we’re supposed to hate Birdman, but I persist in admiring its razor-sharp presentation of a smudgy POV through sardonic, jazzy comedy. I had even allowed myself to hold out hope that was to be the salvation of Alejandro González Iñárritu, a director whose filmography started out with the […]
The Hateful Eight, sure enough, is about hate. I can’t recall the last movie so explicitly about how all of its characters, and by extension the society that they are a part of, are irredeemably evil, and I certainly can’t recall the last one that has such a jolly mood about it. This movie, if […]
A review requested by Thor Rudebeck, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is not going to be anybody’s first answer to the question “name a country that makes animated films” – probably not even the people who live there. […]
A review requested by John M, with thanks for contributing to the ACS Fundraiser. It makes perfect sense for Shakes the Clown from 1991 to be a cult film, so I can only call it a sign of the universe going exactly right that, to the best of my knowledge, it has just such a […]
From among the Video Nasties Any honest accounting of the history of American horror filmmaking has to bow in the direction of the enormous influence of The Last House on the Left, the 1972 debut of writer-director Wes Craven and a solid contender for the title of most controversial movie of the last half-century. It […]
By no reasonable standard is Paul Blart: Mall Cop a good movie. It is perhaps even a very bad movie, and a largely unamusing comedy. That’s even adjusting for the already questionable comic standards of the “fatty fall down” genre, one of the loudest and most obnoxious of all possible subgenres. So it is bizarre […]
A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Knowing, as one can’t help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and […]
A review requested by Mike Gibson, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I shall start with a personal anecdote, since who doesn’t love personal anecdotes from nominally objective arts critics? But “a man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is […]
Still Alice is the kind of movie that exists solely to facilitate a great performance in the lead role, and Julianne Moore provides one. So that’s, like, a good thing. And that Oscar she has not received yet for playing the role as I write these words, but surely will in a few weeks time […]
If I may risk being pithy about the gravest subject in the wide world, we’re living through a golden age of documentaries about mass killings in southeast Asia. Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary, extraordinarily crushing dyad of The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, with their historiographical study of the murder of accused Communists in […]
