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

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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

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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

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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’

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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

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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

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‘BARBARIAN’ Is Part ‘DON’T BREATHE’, Part ‘WRONG TURN’ and it Rules

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Something Wicked This Way Comes

Between 2016’s Don’t Breathe and Barbarian, there’s an emergent sub-genre of horror: Detroit Dystopia. Both films put the urban wreckage of the city’s broken ecosystem under the spotlight to set the scene for unspeakable horrors. Barbarian, if not directly inspired by Fede Alvarez’s 2016 horror hit, shares a lot of the same DNA and influences. Both take place in Detroit’s most rundown neighborhoods – an almost post-civilization shadowland marked by abandoned, graffiti-stained houses, a lack of discernible social services, and the roving few who’ve never left. In the ruin of a once flourishing industrial neighborhood lurks a gaping hole. And in that absence sadism festers. Their tunnels run deep. Read More

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‘THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING’ and the Problem of Story Telling as Storytelling

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All You Need Is Love

First and foremost, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a story about stories. The history of stories, the way in which we tell stories, and the generational impact of those stories. How stories make us feel, make us yearn, make us swoon, make us fundamentally who we are. How stories become passed down from generation to generation and find themselves colored by those telling them. Where is the intersection of truth and stories? And how much can we expect our narrators to be bastions of truth? Further, the film probes how the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are become self-fulfilling prophecies. Essentially – how autobiography can trap their tellers, ensnaring them within a cycle of lying about who or what they truly are. It’s a shame then that the least successful aspect of this particular yarn is the way that it unspools its story. Read More

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‘BEAST’ a Shaggy Summer Slasher With Sharp Claws 

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Be Prepared

Idris Elba is Dr. Nate Samuels, a man visiting his late wife’s African homeland with his two teenage daughters in the predictable, playful creature feature Beast. The Savannah-set B-movie from director Baltasar Kormákur (Everest, 2 Guns) is a lean, mean summer slasher, all tightly-coiled, knuckle-headed muscle and razor-sharp claws lacking any more brain cells than absolutely required. A vengeful lion hunting humans for sport attacks the good doctor, his daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries), and their anti-poacher family friend Martin (Sharlto Copley) while the group is on safari. They must lean on their wits to outsmart the beast and come out of the bush in one piece. 

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Exhaustingly Excessive Actioner ‘BULLET TRAIN’ is Pure Joyless Destruction 

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Snakes On a Train

The scourge that is the 2022 summer movie season continues with the loud, ultra-violent, and ultimately entirely mindless Bullet Train. Best known for the John Wick franchise, Deadpool 2, and the Fast and Furious spin-off Hobbs and Shaw, writer-director David Leitch is a creator of quickly diminishing returns. Here, he delivers an algorithmic Guy Ritchie wanna-be crime whodunnit packed with movie stars and the popular “gun-fu” combat style the former stunt man helped pioneer but short on actual plot locomotion and charm. All set on a train! It’s not an entirely feckless ride, the game performances are just enough to power the film forward and keep the groans to a minimum, but it’s as disposable as it is bloated with wanton destruction. For a movie this unconcerned with logical collateral fallout, one that childishly gawks at violence, it sure does have a strange amount of references to Thomas the Tank Engine. Read More

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‘THIRTEEN LIVES’ Explores the Depths of Human Ingenuity and Bravery in Workmanlike Retelling

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It Takes a Village

Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s dramatic retelling of the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, takes an understatement approach to heroics, swerving away from the dramatic fanfare and teary-eyed grace notes of a typical Hollywood feature and relying instead on something more workmanlike, cut-and-dry, and almost minimalist. The true story that inspires Thirteen Lives has already been brilliantly told in National Geographic’s 2021 documentary The Rescue and Howard largely offers an unfussy translation of those events, without a lot else. In some senses, it could be argued that this feature film is an unnecessary addition to the story as it doesn’t provide any significant new wrinkles to the story as told by documentarians Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. But Howard’s ability to turn historical drama into nail-biting cinema makes this a worthwhile venture nonetheless, even for those acquainted with the details.
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