“Hou Hsiao-Hsien made a wuxia film. That career choice makes logical sense in a vacuum: Hou is positively obsessed with history, and history, more so than fantasy, is wuxia’s bread and butter. But there’s little in Hou’s body of work aside from his preoccupation with the past to suggest an interest in swordplay. He’s made … Continue reading
“Is horror the genre that’s best suited for the anthology format? Think hard, just for a moment or two: How many movies outside of horror’s bailiwick can you drum up offhand that come wrapped up as an omnibus? Turn to comedy and you can rifle off titles like The Kentucky Fried Movie, Everything You Always … Continue reading
“Don’t buy a ticket to Crimson Peak expecting a horror movie. Buy a ticket expecting a Guillermo del Toro movie. Your mileage with the film will improve exponentially, sort of like if you traded in your Bentley for a Tesla. With del Toro, “horror” is a misleading label applied mostly by critics and film geeks. … Continue reading
“A couple weeks have passed since Roland Emmerich released his latest disaster flick, Stonewall, to the outrage of the gay community, the transgender community, the Ron Perlman fanboy community, the film critic community and probably the “outraged over outrage” community, too. Maybe we should have seen the uproar coming. Emmerich is not the man you … Continue reading
“There are two integral components to any review ofBeasts of No Nation: Its identity as a piece of art and its identity as a product of an industry experiencing post-millennial growing pains. “Netflix presents a Netflix original film,” the credits tell us before ticking off requisite hat tips to the project’s other participating bodies. Strictly … Continue reading
“Mexico has had a problem with drug cartels for decades, but the country’s drug war didn’t officially start until Felipe Calderón ordered a battalion of troops to Michoacán for the dispensal of indiscriminate justice in 2006. You can trace the fallout of Calderón martial intervention either through good old fashioned journalism or U.S. pop culture: … Continue reading
“When Joe Wright’s Pan moves its setting away from London and into Neverland, Peter (Levi Miller), not yet the hero we know he becomes, steps out onto the deck of a flying pirate ship to observe a strip mine jammed with filthy children singing a shanty song that sounds an awful lot like “Smells Like … Continue reading
“It’s not every day that you walk into a horror movie expecting it to make you choke up. Usually, we pay the price of admission to scare ourselves silly and enjoy some good old-fashioned exploitative voyeurism; we watch imperiled characters get bumped off with hideous creativity, and once it’s all over, we have the privilege … Continue reading
“Nothing about Jamie Babbit’s Addicted to Fresno sounds bad on paper. Babbit has helmed episodes of Girls, Married, andBrooklyn Nine-Nine in her career, while her partner, Karey Dornetto, has penned installments of Portlandia and vintage Arrested Development; the cast, meanwhile, features Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne in leading roles while the great, criminally underrated Malcolm Barrett, … Continue reading
“It’s best to think of Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm as the spiritual kin of Brendon Small’s great Adult Swim seriesMetalocalypse. They’re both gleefully over-the-top odes to all things metal—from the music to its ethos and iconography. Metalocalypse ran from 2006 to 2012 before capping off with a one-hour rock opera in 2013 and focused on … Continue reading
“If you crack a history book to brush up on the Stonewall riots, you might stumble across the names of gay and transgender activists Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Marsha P. Johnson. If, once you’ve finished your fact checking, you decide to take a peek at the cast list for Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall, an … Continue reading
“Mississippi Grind is a low-stakes movie about high-stakes people who flirt with life and death. Films about gamblers tend toward the tragic more often than they do the comedic (Ocean’s Elevenfilms notwithstanding), butMississippi Grind never quite imposes a sense of danger to its lead Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn), even when he receives text messages from a … Continue reading
“Writer-director John Magary’s debut feature, The Mend, begins with scenes of domestic discord as brothers Mat (Josh Lucas) and Alan (Stephen Plunkett) each engage their significant others in alternately vague and explicit spats. After some boisterous afternoon delight with girlfriend Andrea (Lucy Owen), Mat invites her rage off-screen before she kicks him out of her … Continue reading
In Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s psychological horror stunner Goodnight Mommy, twin brothers Lukas and Elias (Lukas Schwarz and Elias Schwarz) spend their days in isolated idyll in the Austrian countryside, collecting bugs and playing hide-and-seek in cornfields while they wait for their mother to return home following intensive facial surgery. When she does, the … Continue reading
“James “Whitey” Bulger terrorized Boston as the boss of the Winter Hill Gang from the 1970s until the 1990s, went into hiding in 1994, fell into FBI custody in 2011, and now, thanks to filmmaker Scott Cooper, he’s stalking multiplexes in the gangster film Black Mass. For Cooper, the movie marks his third plum gig … Continue reading
“Nothing’s more effective at shaking a teen out of their monotonous high school routine than the arrival of a new student. That’s the stuff actress/director Mélanie Laurent’s sophomore film, Breathe, is made of: mystery and allure, with generous dollops of adolescent rivalry, sexual awakening and verbal abuse spooned on top. Think of Breatheas a distant … Continue reading
“Some cult flicks take decades to germinate in the hearts and minds of schlock enthusiasts, while others announce themselves right away. Director Brian James O’Connell’s Bloodsucking Bastards could easily fall under the latter category, provided it finds the right audience to embrace it. That shouldn’t be too difficult: It stars Fran Kranz, a Joss Whedon … Continue reading
“Who better than Alex Gibney to profile Steve Jobs? Well, probably plenty of directors, but still: Gibney has a reputation as an incisive, no-nonsense documentarian with a keen mind for layered investigation and an impressive bullshit detector. He’s also old hat at dissolving the facade of celebrity—as in his 2013 picture, The Armstrong Lie—and at … Continue reading
“The Neolithic Hongshan of China, Cambodia’s Khmer Empire, the inhabitants of Pakistan’s Indus Valley, the Anasazi—cultures up and vanish all the time in world history. And as tragic as the loss of these cultures may be, it might be more tragic that in certain cases we’re not even sure what, exactly, happened to them. Solving … Continue reading
“The post-apocalyptic future of Turbo Kid might be set in 1997, but the film’s stylistic sensibility is straight from the 1980s. That’s the point, of course; the whole film is intended as an ode to the campy gewgaws of ’80s pop culture. It’s a movie that’s about looking back at a bygone time, both for … Continue reading
A Constant Visual Feast 