Depending on how you count the intermissions that are baked right into the print – there are five of them, all about 15 minutes in length – La Flor is anywhere from about 13.5 hours long to a bit less than 15 hours long. This is, of course The Big Fact about the film that […]
When a film comes into the world with the kind of uncommonly bad reputation as The Grudge, 2020 edition – simultaneously a remake of and sequel to the 2004 film of the same name, and the 13th feature film in a multi-national horror franchise with at least three different continuities – the obvious first question […]
With the new version of Black Christmas, directed and co-written (with April Wolfe) by Sophia Takal, I believe we have crossed an exciting new threshhold: the first classic slasher movie to receive a second remake. The first Black Christmas, from 1974, is one of the most unassailable classics of ’70s horror, beating both The Texas […]
A cursory perusal of the reviews for Disney’s new remake of The Lion King reveals that even some of the pointedly negative ones will concede that it is, at least, a very visually amazing, even beautiful film. This is wrong. It looks like a dead dog’s asshole on a hot day. I have never been […]
Pragmatically, Disney’s new version of Aladdin only had one bar it absolutely had to clear, and it clears it. While this is anywhere from the sixth to the eleventh entry in this unkillable cycle of live-action remake nostalgia jobs, depending on how you count them,* it’s only the second one based on one of the […]
The second feature adaptation of Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Sematary, following a 1989 version that is no classic but has its admirers, possesses three important qualities. One, it has a fog machine, and it’s not afraid to use it, especially when that fog can be backlit to curl across the obviously, appealingly fake […]
If we must get these Disney remakes of their animated features done in unattractive, narratively slack live-action/CGI hybrids – and 2019 is making a particularly loud case that we must – I would say that you could honestly do a lot worse than picking up 1941’s Dumbo as a target. The original film is pure […]
Sebastián Lelio makes exactly one type of movie, and I like it less every time I see it. Take, on this hand, a terrific performance by an actress playing the kind of character who doesn’t generally show up as the protagonist of a movie. Take, on the other hand, nothing fucking whatsoever. Not dramatic urgency, […]
The Upside premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and didn’t receive commercial release in the United States until January 2019 (the demise of The Weinstein Company factored into this). That’s not “commercial release following an Oscar-qualifying run in one Los Angeles theater.” That’s commercial release. There’s such a thing as a distributor knowing […]
Ultimately, there is a grand total of one test that Welcome to Marwen has to pass, and it does not. To wit, does this film do anything to justify its existence in face of the 2010 documentary Marwencol, which treats on exactly the same subject as this highly fantasised biopic, and does so with great […]
The film itself isn’t nearly important enough to earn this, but you could do a lot worse than holding up 1970’s The Horror of Frankenstein as a summary of all the things going terribly wrong with Hammer Film Productions at the dawn of the ’70s. The studio’s reign across the anglosphere as the premiere home […]
As the late 1950s faded into the early 1960s, perhaps the two most interesting things happening anywhere in horror cinema (change “perhaps” to “absolutely” if we limit the conversation to the English-speaking world) were the heavy shift over to Gothic horror pictures made by Britain’s Hammer Film Productions, and the brief but intense and unbelievably […]
