Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Long-winded and neither as smart, surprising, or sassy as it thinks, Bad Times at the El Royale is a stylish snow-globe of sixties subcultures clown-car piled into an overdrawn neo-noir. Bursting at the seams with metaphorical material and cultural commentary but featherlight on plot and deep-dive character development, this strangers-at-a-hotel mystery has a lot of guff and bluster but little actual punch. It’s not exactly bad times but the times decidedly aren’t so grand either. Read More
An aimless, awful embarrassment for everyone involved, Venom imagines a world where a dopey Peter Parker-type was instead bitten by a radioactive turd. Creatively bankrupt filmmaking from top to bottom, Venom bows under the weight of an insufferable script, flat-out strange performances, and a mishmash tone that tries to levy the darkness of a character that waxes about snacking on eyeballs and fingers and livers in with scatalogical jokes that truly only the prepubescent in the audience would giggle along with. Read More
Manifest destiny makes no promises of prosperity. Those seeking riches in the wild, wild west were treated to the same pittance of dumb luck and social hierarchy that they were long familiar in the eastern shores. What distinguished the far reaches of the American West in the mid-1800s was the fierce cascade of violence that hung over the land like a raging conflagration and the profit one could seek by exacting that violence. Bounty hunters and criminals pocked the far-flung towns, trading human lives for riches. This is where we meet The Sisters Brothers. Read More
“What is love if not a helpless acceptance of our lover’s shortcomings?” the powerful music drama A Star is Born asks. The tragic romance shared between career musician Jackson Maine and up-and-comer Ally at the center of A Star is Born is a refreshingly raw cinematic punch to the stomach. Seasoned with somber specificity, the film’s dramatic twists of the knife are fastened sharply to the beating hearts of its potent characters. We experience joy alongside them. We grieve with them. Their hardship pains us just as we celebrate their victories, small and large. From writing a song drunkenly on the sidewalk to belting it out live to a packed crowd, A Star is Born tends to the moments the define their characters’ lives, all the while holding its audience emotionally hostage to their often ill-conceived impulses. Read More
The amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for triggering fear, is a critical component of human evolution. It’s the thing that tells most people not to backflip off a rooftop into a pool. Or warns them not to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle. Or climb the three-thousand-plus face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope. Few people see these death-defying stunts as challenges, testing the utmost limits of man. Many meet their demise in these tournaments with mortality. Read More
Kids meet Eli Roth. Eli Roth, kids. The horror auteur, infamous for torture porn cornerstone Hostel and – to a lesser degree – gooey meta-slasher Cabin Fever, takes to Amblin-produced PG material with surprising poise. Roth, who up to this point has strictly directed hard-R films, adapts the first of John Bellairs’ twelve-part children’s novels from the 1970s, The House With a Clock in its Walls, proffering a mostly family-friendly vision of dark witchcraft, haunted houses, and misfittery. The tale of woebegone wizardry may never fully clicks into place like the magical clock in its title but this Halloween-tinged creeper should fulfill paperback preteens looking for an age-appropriate spook. Read More
A killer isn’t born, a killer is made. Or so goes the phrase. If my hours spent to tuning in to “The Last Podcast on the Left” has taught me anything, it’s that the vast majority of serial killers come from deeply troubled homes. This is surely the case for Lizzie Borden. One of the most notorious female killers in history, the well-to-do Borden came from a respectable lineage, one of both prestige and prosperity. In Lizzie, the crumbs for a double homicide are laid inside a household that stewed dark impulses and nasty internal affairs. Read More
Detroit. 1984. Industry has dried up. Police and government corruption is a widespread cancer. The city is eating itself alive. Matthew McCoughanhey’s mulleted Rick Sr. laments the rapid decline into gang activity, violence, and drugs. When his son, the eponymous White Boy Rick, asks why they don’t just pick up and haul off, McCoughanhey waxes through a redneck stache, “The lion doesn’t leave the Serengeti.” But not even Toto would bless this foul land. Read More
Shane Black proves a semi-charmed remedy for the wavering outer space slasher franchise in The Predator, ushering in a new era of the horror-tinged sci-fi action with gutsy enthusiasm and immature brio. A neck-break pace and trademark jet Black humor define this goofy, giddy motion picture about blood-thirsty invaders from outer space come to an American small town right out of a John Mellencamp song. The fourth (or sixth if you count the dreadful Alien cross-over events) installment in the Rastafarian space slayer series manages no shortage of missteps – waddling into the three-pronged crosshair of some hot topic controversy along the way – but comes out the other side as a buoyant, bloody joyride of cinematic ridiculousness that revels in its throwback homaging of the excesses of the 1980s. Read More
If you’ve ever asked yourself “What the fuck did I just watch?” just wait until you get a load of Mandy. The avant-garde metal midnighter from Italian director Panos Cosmatos yields a phantasmagoric descent into hell itself, where none other than Nicholas Cage (in all his unhinged glory) plays a logger named Red Miller who hunts down an LSD-fueled Christian cult and a literal biker gang from hell to avenge the love of his life (Andrea Riseborough, rocking a heavy metal Shelley Duvall look) . Turns out, hell hath no fury like a Nicolas Cage scorned. Read More