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Cannibals Need Companionship Too In Rangy ‘BONES AND ALL’

Sympathy for The Devil 

Luca Guadagnino has made a career of sucking every last ounce of fat from the narrative bones of his projects. From his arthouse critical darling Call Me By Your Name, a sweeping pedophilic queer romance, to his celebrated – though gaudy and overwrought – remake of Suspiria, Guadagnino suckles on the teat of indulgence. This viewer has found Guadagnino’s style overtly lugubrious, feigning depth by overstaying his welcome, applying a Terrence Malick aesthetic template to otherwise intriguing conceptual pitches. This is no different in his latest adaptation, Bones and All, a cannibal love story that 100% should be my jam but wasn’t entirely. Read More

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Weinstein Investigative Procedural ‘SHE SAID’ Puts the Whole System on Trial 

Nasty Women Unite

An effective tribute to the institution of the free press, Maria Schrader’s She Said traces the roots of the #MeToo movement back to a high-stakes investigation into Miramax’s super-producer, the now-incarcerated Harvey Weinstein. Told through the lens of an old-school investigative procedural, Schrader’s film is an examination of individual injustices against specific women – both familiar high-profile actresses and lesser-known assistants who suffered Weinstein’s advances equally – and the structural hierarchy put in place to protect their violators.  Read More

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‘THE MENU’ Deliciously Satirizes the Cult of Kitchen

A Taste of Honey

Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) is not supposed to be dining out at Hawthorne. After all, a table at Hawthorne is amongst the most difficult reservations to land on the planet, held solely for the affluent, celebrities, and those with their own gravitational sphere of influence. From the moment she arrives at the esteemed remote island restaurant, Margot is out of place against the other diners. Esteemed critics, minor celebrities, finance bros – the usual suspects have gathered to taste the creations of Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). And then there’s Margot. The worst part? She doesn’t even really like the food. Read More

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‘BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER’ Celebrates A Life Through the Largess of the Blockbuster

Long Live the King

Marvel Studios don’t really make movies so much as installments. Each new entry to their ever expanding stable of (increasingly disconnected) films feels like little more than a stepping stone towards more. The next sequel. The next phase. The next saga. There’s never a minute to rest. And even when there is a rare moment of quiet, that beat becomes just another opportunity for an incoming quip or a chance to tease the space with allusions to some eggy comic book lore (never forget Thor in the sauna). What a breathe of fresh air then Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is actually a real movie unto itself; an individual story about legacy and loss, complicated by real life grief and the guilt of carrying on. Read More

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Wanna-Be Antihero ‘BLACK ADAM’ A Slave to Formula 

Between A Rock and a Hard Place

Heroes don’t kill. Or at least that’s what Black Adam tells us, seemingly having forgotten that arguably this same universe’s most famous hero, Batman, himself was beating criminals to a bloody corpse not five years prior. That Black Adam is predicated on the will-he-won’t-he of Dwayne Johnson choosing good or evil should speak to the level of surprises in store with the DCEU’s latest superhero wank. It is, after all, The Rock we’re talking about here. We know who this man is. Or rather who he always present himself as. We’re hardwired at this point to know what kind of characters he (almost exclusively) plays and which he does not. He’s groomed beyond the point of being hairless. Family-friendly to the point where he’s never had a sexual interest in any movie that I can remember. The man is a walking, talking PR creation. Threateningly non-threatening. Only the clueless or culturally-apathetic will be left to wonder which way this is going to turn out. Spoiler alert, it’s just a matter of time before this ostensible antihero becomes a slave to the reluctant hero formula.  Read More

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‘HALLOWEEN ENDS’ Simultaneously a Weird and Rote Send-Off to a Killer Icon

Evil Goes Viral

Even if Halloween Ends is a messy, weird, convoluted, predictable, and only quasi-satisfying conclusion to the 40-plus year Michael Myers saga, you have to give it credit for actually trying something new. For much of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy-capper and alleged conclusion to the franchise (at least for now), Mike Myers is MIA. He’s gone. Not involved. For the vast majority of the film, he exists moreso as the lingering idea of the nature of evil than as an actual hulking killer. Instead the focus is on an entirely new character, Corey (Rohan Campbell), a hapless teen who gets roped into a night of babysitting. One prank gone wrong later, Corey accidents kills his charge.  Read More

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‘THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN’ Examines the Tragic Hilarity of a Country at War With Itself

A Very Civil War

The year is 1923. In Inisherin, a small, remote island off the east coast of Ireland, the days are filled with an almost apocalyptic ennui. From across the bitter cold of the Atlantic, the report of gunfire and cannons signal the ongoing Irish Civil War. Ireland’s Civil War came on the heels of their War of Independence from Great Britain. And claimed even more lives. It pit brothers and friends against one another, forcing allies who had fought alongside each other just the year prior against England at each other’s throats. The war was deeply personal and subsequently bitter and bloody. Read More

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‘SMILE’ Curses Audience With a Bloody Good Time

Grin and Bear It

For those who have experienced it, trauma becomes a dormant passenger. Quietly lurking, but always there behind the curtain. A pile of kindling awaiting a match. In Parker Finn’s supernatural-psychological horror movie Smile, trauma manifests as a suicide curse. When a therapist’s patients brutally kills herself in front of her, Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) becomes the latest victim in a trauma cycle where a compulsion to commit suicide is passed on like a baton. In the world of Smile, if you watch someone kill themselves in spectacularly horrific fashion, you become doomed to die next.

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Mia Goth Has the ‘X’-Factor in Devilish Prequel ‘PEARL’

X Marks The Spot

Ladies and gentlemen, Mia Goth! In Ti West’s remarkably entertaining prequel to X (his other 2022 slasher), Goth plays a woman desperate to be a star but doomed never to be one. The irony is that Pearl should be the movie that propels Goth herself to proper stardom. She’s simply sensational. Featuring as the titular character, Goth steps back into the shoes of a sex-starved, corn-fed, farm-raised vixen with a predilection for murder by pitchfork. This time, West explores her youth, focusing on how her environs and lovelorn family dynamic transform her into the villain we later meet in X. Read More

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‘DON’T WORRY DARLING’ Caught Between Sexy Paranoid Thriller and MAGA Utopia

Make America Great Again

Don’t Worry Darling reminds me of the controversial John Lennon song “Women is the N***** of the World”. The 1972 single is agitprop at its most blatant, employing the titular racial epithet as a means of offensive, highly-loaded language to unsettle, upset, agitate, and shock the listener into embracing the parallel Lennon and Yoko Ono are drawing. Much like director Olivia Wilde (Booksmart) in her sophomore film which, in keeping with the art of exploitation, uses the provocative images of women self harming, receiving electro-shock therapy, and just generally being told they’re being crazy. The meaning of Lennon’s homology is lost on none who listen, equating worldwide sexism with American racism, challenging the global problem of subjugation and control with regards to gender politics. It’s a demanding song, and hard to love for many reasons, but it sticks with you. The problem with Don’t Worry Darling is that at some point in the midst of the film, shock turns to shlock. The challenging Lennon refrain fades, replaced, almost without any explanation, with the more familiar ballad of Beyoncé’s girl power anthem “Run the World”.  Read More