What a year it’s been. In some capacities, post-pandemic life began to creep back to normal with the aid of vaccines. So too did the global box office. But multiple variants spooked people into skipping out of movies in theaters as a fundamental shift to the industry took shape. Day and date releases became more prevalent as the economics of a new movie market unfurled. A misleading rescue beacon, Spider-Man: No Way Home just delivered the best receipts of the entire 2020/2021 but that level of resurgent success seemed reserved exclusively for superhero content. No adult-skewing cinema has fared nearly as well. Read More
Psychosexual Fever Dream ‘TITANE’ Pushes All the Right Buttons
It’s worth prefacing my thoughts on Titane by reminding readers that Julia Ducournau’s Raw was my favorite film of 2017. Darkly funny and completely uncompromising, that cannibal coming-of-age horror sunk its teeth in deep to unspool a surprisingly thematic story of sexual appetites, family politics, and genetic disposition. I loved every minute of Ducournau’s irreverent storytelling; her evident hunger to show up fully formed with her debut film, and her reveling in the national bloodlust that is the French New Extremity movement revealed a filmmaking talent of untold potential. Read More