I will say this about Five Nights at Freddy’s, an extremely unlikable piece of shit movie whose enormous, instantaneous box-office success has filled me with the gloomy suspicion that we’re staring down the gun barrel of a new epoch where the only movies that become hits are the ones that can be turned into memes: […]
A review by M.C. Steffen Part of giving any movie a fair shake is making an effort to grasp the codes it uses to communicate to its intended audience. In a musical, when characters sing, you’re meant to understand that they’re expressing emotions too overwhelming for mere speech; whether that convention is to your taste […]
Proximity serves as both fascination and frustration in Fire of Love, a documentary portrait of the Alsatian French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. Let’s begin with physical proximity, since it was the couple’s penchant for cozying up to active volcanoes that captured the world’s imagination and—this isn’t remotely a spoiler; the movie informs us of […]
For its first 35 minutes or so, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande foregrounds one of the most fascinating, maddening conversational duets in a good long while—the kind of extended two-hander that definitely feels like transplanted theater but rarely suffers from that feeling. The characters in question are Leo Grande (natch), a ludicrously handsome young […]
When I told Tim I would like to start doing some Bollywood reviews for Alternate Ending, he practically pushed me out the door with a broom and told me to get going, chop chop. So here is the first of what will hopefully be a long line of reviews that expand AE even further into […]
My favorite piece of narration in Werner Herzog’s tremendous 2005 documentary Grizzly Man goes like this: “[I]n all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world […]
“Lunatic visionary cult director Sono Sion makes his English-language debut with a post-apocalyptic samurai Western starring Nicolas Cage” is a collection of words that feels like it was lab-created to end up with a kind of heavily self-aware “Weird”-in-square-quotes example of something too knowing and calculated in its what-the-fuck wildness to be authentic. And arguably, […]
Steve McQueen’s Small Axe project has been gestating almost as long as he’s had a career as a film director: for a full decade, he was attempting to put together what ended up as a five-part television anthology series of stories (some of them based on true events) about life among the West Indian population […]
Whether you consider it a strength, or the movie’s most damning flaw, I think this much cannot be denied: The Godfather, Part II knows the scale of the movie it’s following, and it is hellbent on topping it. 1972’s The Godfather, adapted from Mario Puzo’s 1969 crime novel, was never supposed to be one of […]
It’s almost certainly just random noise and not real evidence of a greater trend, but as I spend these weeks diving into the thrillers and horror films of the Australian film industry, I’m finding a lot more dead children than I’d expect to see in a similarly arbitrary sampling of Hollywood horror films. And with […]
Every Saturday in August, Brennan Klein will be subbing in for Summer of Blood by exploring a German krimi film from the 1960’s. Well, here we are. It’s the final week of our Summer of Krimi and we’ve reached the end of the line. The subgenre that started that fateful day in 1959 when the Germans first […]
Every Saturday in August, Brennan Klein will be subbing in for Summer of Blood by exploring a German krimi film from the 1960’s. We’re approaching the end of our overview of the German krimi cycle, and as anyone who reads Summer of Blood surely knows by now, the tail end of a subgenre’s boom is when […]
