I reviewed the first half of The Muppets, ABC’s misguided attempt at bringing the Muppet crew to modern audiences, last year. If you kept up with my recapping, you may remember that my thoughts on the show went all over the place; sometime I liked it, sometimes I didn’t, sometimes I nothing’d it, depending on the … Continue reading
Matches for: “the lure” …
“Surface-Level Adaptation ‘The Silent Twins’ Quiets Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Style”
…yeah, maybe they shoulda stayed silent? Continue reading
“Shahad Ameen’s Beautiful, Fantastical ‘Scales’ Picks Away at the Patriarchy”
For anyone in search of a “Luca” alternative. Continue reading
“10 Underrated Horror Movies To Feast On This Month”
Doesn’t get much more cut and dry than this, especially as regards the movies here where monsters and villains exist who wish for nothing more than to cut you and leave you dry. Continue reading
Best of Criterion’s New Releases, October 2017
If Criterion’s October slate was comprised primarily of shit alongside either The Lure or Barry Lyndon, it’d still be a pretty good slate. Incredibly, both of these films appeared on the slate with a handful of other great films, so basically if you missed out on October’s releases, you really missed out (and might I recommend you take … Continue reading
Why Female-Driven Horror Movies Are More Timely Than Ever
Gang: It’s been a gross, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. It’s been a gross, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for a slew of reasons, but I’m here today to talk about the Harvey Weinstein scandal (which isn’t quite a “scandal,” because sexual abuse isn’t scandalous; it’s criminal). Because I am me, … Continue reading
The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2017 (So Far)
I know what you thought when you read the title on this piece: “It’s April.” Yes, it is, but shut up. Shhhh. Stop. It’s okay. I know it’s April. We all know it’s April. I have gadgets all around me screaming the date at me at any given time during the day. Relax. It’s going to … Continue reading
Review: Prevenge, 2017, dir. Alice Lowe
“A 7 months pregnant woman starts murdering the people involved in her partner’s death because her unborn baby tells her to.” That’s Prevenge in summation. In my mind, there’s an alternate dimension where the film attached to that summation is just a winking, nudging, overly self-aware video nasty, and it’s probably fun but too insistent on … Continue reading
“40 Years Later, ‘Possession’ Is Recut, Restored, and Ready for Its Horror Audience”
If you’ve seen anything out of Possession, but haven’t seen all of Possession yourself, then you’ve probably seen its signature scene, where Isabelle Adjani makes like a madwoman and writhes while secreting whatever substance you can imagine. Hopefully, you’ve seen the material bookending that sequence, but if not, there’s ample opportunity to see the film now, 40 years … Continue reading
“‘Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash’: An Offbeat Martial Arts Romance That Really Wants To Become A Cult Classic [TIFF Review]”
Look, people are gonna like this more than me and that’s fine; no matter what, we all agree that this movie has the best title of any movie released in like the last 20 years. Continue reading
“Corporations Triumph Over Cars in Ford v Ferrari”
Vroom vroom zoom zoom beep beep screech crash bang boom man emotions vroooooom manly slap fight zip zip zap Continue reading
Review: Greener Grass, 2019, dir. Jocelyn DeBoer & Dawn Luebbe
And you thought my obsession with “Lemon” was a sign of twisted character! Continue reading
“How The Venture Bros. Brilliantly Blurs the Line Between Hero and Villain”
If there’s a fundamental theme in The Venture Bros., it’s failure. If there’s a fundamental dynamic that dramatizes the element of failure, it’s self-involvement: All of the major characters in the series tend to cause their own problems, and this is as true of the first two episodes of Season 7 as any other episode in … Continue reading
“Renew Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Bust!”
I started reviewing Brooklyn Nine-Nine for Paste Magazine way back in the day, about four years ago in fact, so if anyone is going to write an editorial about Fox’s jaw-dropping failure to renew the series for a sixth season it’s going to be me. Which is basically a convoluted way of saying that I wrote an … Continue reading
Review: The Drowning, 2017, dir. Bette Gordon
Guys! I’m back! I made it home! I survived vacation! (TL;DR version of my vacation: We went to Vienna, Prague, Aberystwyth, and London, and now we’re all horribly jet lagged.) That means I have a whole lot of stuff to plop in your laps for your reading pleasure, and of course it would be pleasurable, wouldn’t it? We’ll … Continue reading
Let The 2017 Independent Film Festival Boston Line-Up Stay With You
There’s very little about IFFBoston’s 2017 that I am not excited about. I’m always excited for IFFBoston, of course, for reasons I’ve elaborated on very recently on the pages of this very blog (and which I’ve probably talked about extensively in the deep past), so I’ll spare you my usual spiel on the subject. In 2017, I’m … Continue reading
It’s (Almost) Independent Film Festival Boston Time, Y’all
Every year for the last five years, springtime has provoked a transformation of sorts in me, or maybe more accurately provoked my unabashed and kinda obnoxious excitement. If you’ve been keeping up, you can probably guess why: Spring in Boston means Independent Film Festival Boston, which means that for a week or so, Andy gets … Continue reading
Review: Anatahan, 1953, dir. Josef von Sternberg
There are two primary reasons to see Josef von Sternberg’s <i>Anatahan</i>. The first is that it’s a rarity, the final film in Sternberg’s solo directing career before co-directing <i>Jet Pilot</i> in 1957 with Fred Fleck. <i>Anatahan</i> is a picture obscured by the passage of time and by its own financial failure, a box office stumble … Continue reading
Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, 2016, dir. David Yates
I didn’t like The Legend of Tarzan, the first of two movies on David Yates’ slate in 2016. I also didn’t like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, his second movie, but I liked it much more even if its failures left me feeling aggrieved more than Tarzan‘s did; it’s perhaps the 2016 franchise film that is … Continue reading
“The Legend of Tarzan’s Hashtag Problem”
…annnnnd here’s “part two” of my attempt at getting to the core of why The Legend of Tarzan is such a failure and such an embarrassment as a modern studio blockbuster. How do you make a racist novel written in bygone times un-racist? Can you? Is it worth the effort to try? And is trying in and of … Continue reading