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‘NOSFERATU’: Eggers Delivers an Instant Horror Classic That Seduces, Haunts

Evil is the plague of desire, heartache etched across time and space, in Robert Egger’s immaculately constructed gothic horror, Nosferatu. A remake that leans on this classical haunt’s impressionistic terrors as much as it engages in a century-long conversation with the story itself, mining the treasured material for new macabre corners to exploit and desecrate, Nosferatu is an artisanal implosion of Egger’s unholy but exacting storytelling sensibilities. The craft is front and center in Egger’s frigidly cold, knottily twisted reimagining of this vampiric tragedy: Jarin Blaschke’s moonlit, candle-flickering cinematography lures you into the shadows; Craig Lathrop’s meticulously haunted set designs create a tension between the living and the dead, the opulent and the otherworldly; and composer Robin Carolan’s deliciously unnerving score binds the film’s horrors into a single unholy hymn, deepening the dread that Egger’s impeccable craft brings to life. What prevails is a singular vision of demented yearning and moral corruption where you don’t dare look away from the screen for an instant—for fear of being seduced by Nosferatu’s spell—or perhaps because you already have been. Read More

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‘BOY KILLS WORLD’ A Graphic Overkill That Tires Quickly

Boy Kills World plunges viewers into a frenetic, hyper-stylized dystopia reminiscent of a violent graphic novel, drenched in buckets of expertly-extracted gore. It’s a stylish mélange of the warped battle royale fantasia of The Hunger Games with Schumacher’s colorful and daffy 90s Batman movie entries, spiced with a dash of the meta, self-aware hyper-violence of the popular TV series The Boys. A decidedly over-the-top action genre entry by first-time filmmaker Moritz Mohr, Boy Kills World swings for the fences, though it occasionally whiffs due to its extreme, maximalist approach. Read More

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‘JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4’ and Why You Don’t Get Sick of the Wick

What is a John Wick movie? A confluence of neon-lit backdrops, thumping EDM kill music, a stony Keanu Reeves hacking through monosyllabic dialogue, and more minutes of gun-fu action choreography than most other movies have just plain minutes, John Wick has become a genre unto itself. A John Wick movie is just that: a John Wick movie. And this John Wick movie, John Wick: Chapter 4, is the most John Wick of them all. Read More

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Out in Theaters: ‘IT’

Growing up in Maine, I’ve lived in the land of Steven King’s inspiration. I’ve suffered the bone-chattering winters. Lurked the dense, immutable forests, always so convincingly haunted whenever they needed to be. I’ve challenged forbidden historic landmarks in the twilight hours, suspecting authority, or something more sinister, at every dark fated turn. As a boy, I chomped through King’s preternatural catalogue of horror novels, perhaps because of my budding adoration of the genre, perhaps because he was quite simply the most famous guy from Maine I knew of. I’d taken down “The Shining”, “Carrie”, “Misery”, “The Green Mile”, “The Dead Zone”, “Cujo”, “The Mist”, “Needful Things”, “Pet Sematary”, “Christine”, “Firestarter”, “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon”, “Gerald’s Game”, and “Thinner” by the time I was 12. But nothing in King’s oeuvre haunted me more than his 1986 classic “It”. That shit had me shivering in my rain boats.  Read More