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‘CRIMES OF THE FUTURE’ Surgically Digs Into Society’s Bulging Guts

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Surgery is the New Sex

The Canadian King of Venereal Horror, David Cronenberg, puts the perfectly bewildering capstone to his legacy of gross, mind-bending body horror with his latest feature Crimes of the Future. At once an exploration of the horrors of the post-post-modern human evolutionary track and a not-too-subtle cry for radical environmentalism, the 79-year old director’s latest stroke of squeamish cinema is a fitting encapsulation of the creator’s  entire demented body of work.   Read More

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‘TOP GUN: MAVERICK’ Offers Peak Blockbuster Thrills, Exceeding Original On Every Front

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Cruise. Control. 

A legacy sequel that could have easily been nothing more than unnecessary nostalgia bait, Top Gun: Maverick is instead a tour de force blockbuster that reminds us of the joys of watching movies at the theater. After two years of wondering what the future of in-person cinema would look like in a post-Covid era, the high-flying feature from director Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Only the Brave) recalls the aspirational magic of the theatrical experience by looking back at what came before while also graciously paving the path forward. Read More

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Kafkatesque ‘MEN’ Favors Allegory, Mood Over Plot

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Men? Meh.

If we feel pain, are we doomed to it? Writer-director Alex Garland’s latest film, Men, is plagued by this one idea: the cyclical, unwavering nature of pain and abuse. Jessie Buckley is Harper, a woman suffering. After a traumatic incident involving her former husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper retreats to the English countryside to find some quiet away from the city and the life she shared with her ex. While she intends to give herself space for emotional healing, Harper instead finds an intrusive, hellish male community seemingly dead-set on breaking her down further. Events turns more weird, then utterly hellish. Read More

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When Sam Raimi Lets Loose, ‘DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS’ Is Pure Dark Magic. Otherwise, Meh.

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Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered

The multitude of successes and failures of the larger MCU brand is put on full display with its most recent entry, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The film directed by Spider-Man and Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, more than any other Marvel effort to date, underscores issues of creative overlording (Kevin Feige, master of the box office, checking in) that has long plagued the comic book production house. The push and pull between actual directorial style and ownership of said style and the larger corporatized Marvel Brand has never been so readily apparent in the finished product, resulting in one of Marvel’s most split-identity entries to date. One that also houses some of its most daring and dazzling segments across all of its 28 films and six Disney+ TV events. Read More

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‘THE NORTHMAN’, A Life of Death

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Heavy Metal 895

Robert Eggers finds the language of a movie before anything else. Drawing up the screenplay for The Witch, Eggers studied journals, diaries, and anything from the early days of American settlers that he could get his hands on. Through their particularly dated parlance, he crafted a haunting vision of religious fervor gone amuck in a haunted New England wood. For his sophomore feature, The Lighthouse, Eggers looked to the vernacular of folklore, myths, and seamen, spinning spittle-infused soliloquies about mariner curses on the 1890s high seas. His salty dialogue matched perfectly with Willem Dafoe’s wide-eyed delivery. With The Northman, Eggers pairs with Icelandic poet Sjón to find the language of the 9th century Nordic people. And their language is violence. Read More

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Pointless ‘FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE’ Spends Last Shred of Goodwill on Political Allegory 

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Avada Kedavra Beasts Franchise!

Grindewald runs for public office, the Dumbledore family tree expands, and Magizoologist Newt Scamander dances with dungeon scorpions in the absolutely pointless, painfully-dull, franchise-killing Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Series mainstay Katherine Waterston had the good sense to sit this one out and I wish I had as well. Read More

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The 10 Best Performances of 2021

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With the Oscars set to finally wrap up the 2021 Awards season this evening, it’s worth looking past the politicking and star power of the major awards shows to what was truly the most outstanding performances of last year. Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, the Academy Awards sometimes get things right but more often than not favor history and campaigning into who walks away with the golden statue. I’m looking instead at the purity of the performance in question to name the 10 best performances of 2021. Read More

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SXSW ’22: Punchy ‘BODIES BODIES BODIES’ Subverts Slasher Formula

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Everyone’s always a suspect in any slasher movie worth its salt and that’s true up until the very last moments in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. The film, which stars a slew of established and rising talent in the form of Maria Bakalova, Lee Pace, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Peter Davidson, and a scene-stealing Rachel Sennott, cleverly subverts what we know of the genre trappings and what we – perhaps falsely? – assume to be true.  Read More

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SXSW ‘22: Yearning Homoerotic Thriller ‘IT IS IN US ALL’ 

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When out-of-tower Hamish (Cosmo Jarvis) gets in a head-on-collision with Irish teenagers Callum and Evan (Rhys Mannion), only the later survives. Reeling from the fallout, the unscathed Evan and banged up Hamish wind up in a complicated dance, caught somewhere between trauma bonding and flirtation in a film that’s slow to reveal its hand. Their relationship becomes bizarrely intimate but undercut with a simmering level of foreboding in actress-turned-first-time-director Antonia Campbell Hughes‘ introspective thriller It Is In Us All. Read More

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SXSW ‘22: ‘LINOLEUM’, A Life from Orbit 

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Jim Gaffigan stars as astronomer and public television personality Cameron Edwin in Colin West’s science fiction-tinged festival dramedy Linoleum. A bodega-version Bill Nye, Cameron leads the failing daily children’s show ‘Above & Beyond’ which after years of existing in obscurity has been picked up by a major network. The rub? Cameron will be replaced as the show’s host by his straight-laced doppelgänger Kent Armstrong (also played by Gaffigan), a more successful, better looking version of himself whose arrival  signals a series of enigmatic occurrences. Not everything is as it seems. Read More