“Eat, drink, man, woman, food, sex,” says aging chef Old Wen (Jui Wang) to his lifelong friend and fellow chef Lao Zhu (Sihung Lung). “It’s all the same. You can’t separate them.” For Lao, widowed father of three grown daughters all straining toward independence in the bustling world ...
2021-07-24 06:25:05 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something almost preternaturally sad about Dave Davis’s face, a sense of noble but all-encompassing defeat in his slack jaw, gaunt cheeks, and bruised eyes. As Yakov Ronen, a mentally ill and traumatized young man trying and failing to make his way in the world after leaving New York ...
2021-07-22 06:09:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Nicholas Cage has been a lot of things throughout his long and prolific acting career. Oddball Indie leading man, Hollywood superstar, coked-out weirdo, C-list jobber, and, most recently, a sort of walking meme à la Keanu Reeves — a cutout of himself cast at least as much for the “haha, it...
2021-07-22 02:18:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I, Claudius, the BBC’s 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God, is an artifact of an entirely different television landscape. A horny, violent, and darkly funny historical epic which aired during primetime on a publicly f...
2021-07-21 04:01:04 +0000 UTC View PostThis week's I Would Like to See It is late on account of travel and illness, but will be made up this coming week! Thanks in advance for your patience while I hack out my lungs <3
2021-07-18 03:16:09 +0000 UTC View Post
The supermodel Liliko (Erika Sawajiri) sits on a ledge, legs parted, hair thrown in a black river over one bare shoulder. Behind her, a mural depicting an enormous technicolor set of lips smiles from the wall as before her, Hada (Shinobu Terajima) approaches in a nervous crouch to slip between he...
2021-07-10 05:31:53 +0000 UTC View Post
The first time we really see Primo (Tony Shalhoub) cook, directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott shoot it with a pure and unrestrained but deeply skilled and disciplined joy, following the brisk whisking together of flour and egg and water, the play of fingers over glistening dough, the brushi...
2021-07-10 01:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s impossible to overstate how sexy Andréa (Andréa Ferréol) is in Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe. She’s a cheerfully vulgar angel of death, red-cheeked and Rubenesque, constantly overflowing dresses and brassieres as she demands to be fed, to be spoiled, to be fucked. She is...
2021-07-03 05:01:05 +0000 UTC View Post
And so the month’s dive into recent Korean film concludes with Roaring Currents, or The Admiral, Kim Han-Min’s historical epic about the Battle of Myeongnyang in which disgraced and ailing Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin (Choi Min-sik) faces seemingly insurmountable odds, his flee...
2021-07-02 23:15:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Starting in July, $10 patrons and above are invited to a monthly Discord screening of one of my favorite horror movies! I might make this more frequent depending on interest, but I'm so excited to share each and every movie I have planned with all of you!
2021-06-26 19:43:45 +0000 UTC View Post
“The unwantable woman” is a broad and thematically complex subgenre of horror. From the horny, delusional dysfunction of teen wannabe-surgeon Pauline (Annalynne McCord) in Excision to Maud’s (Morfydd Clark) heartbreakingly inept attempts to make friends in Saint Maud, horr...
2021-06-24 00:12:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom’s Shutter is riffing pretty obviously on Ringu, Ju-On: The Grudge, and other seminal East Asian horror from around the turn of the millennium, borrowing their long-haired, rotten-skinned ghost maidens for its own lonely spec...
2021-06-23 21:56:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The moral and cultural underpinnings of the “kidnapped daughter, vengeful father (or father figure)” genre are only slightly less regressive than your average police union, fantasies of justified and hyper-competent violence in defense of the purity of a virginal child, stories the most far-f...
2021-06-21 21:25:25 +0000 UTC View Post
The script of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye never tries to match the fever pitch of what’s happening on screen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t fall short. As towers of blasted earth are heaved up skyward and Cammell’s camera soars over vistas of junk, machinery, and barre...
2021-06-16 22:42:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Indifference, more than anything, is what makes exploitation and abuse not just possible but commonplace. Without callous authorities interested only in doing as little as possible and upholding the status quo and a selfish, disinterested public unwilling to involve themselves in the suffering of...
2021-06-11 19:49:56 +0000 UTC View Post
A triptych by the incomparable @horstmannart of a currently back-burnered Magical Girl story I'm writing
2021-06-09 18:28:50 +0000 UTC View Post
An unpaid cabbie, a jilted date, a hamburger ordered and abandoned; Scorsese’s After Hours is a veritable spider web of minor social obligations in which hapless everyman Paul (Griffin Dunne) becomes ever more inescapably entangled, tripped up over and over again by his own prior attem...
2021-06-09 16:19:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Nestled between the tongue-in-cheek moralizing of its nearly Leave It to Beaver-esque opening and closing monologues, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid is a blackly satirical thriller about the fragility of the bourgeois mid-century Korean nuclear family. When the respectable, hard...
2021-06-07 07:38:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Its final moments are marred by cheesy special effects, its characterization of its protagonist wavers somewhat in the second and third acts, and its typically excellent melodrama sometimes falls a trifle flat, but Im Sang-soo’s 2010 remake of the classic erotic thriller The Housemaid ...
2021-06-05 05:07:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Where does pain come from? Can you run your hand over the shape of it until you leave behind the silted delta of memory and come to the clear water of its source? In Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 drama Eve’s Bayou, an ambiguous moment of broken boundaries between father and daughter rips its wa...
2021-06-04 03:22:24 +0000 UTC View Post
When Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror hit Alien hit theaters, it revolutionized special effects and kicked the wheezing horror genre into high gear. While Alien is without question Scott’s best movie, tightly paced and claustrophobic, Swiss painter H. R. Giger’s legendary...
2021-05-30 02:25:58 +0000 UTC View Post
The double meaning in the title of Takashi Nomura’s 1967 Yakuza noir is plain from its opening moments. A gun opens any door for a man who knows how to use it, but death, in the end, is the only place that it can truly take him. In that light it’s remarkable how little action the film feature...
2021-05-29 14:19:43 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s been twenty years since I first saw Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary science fiction/body horror film Akira, hunched breathless and nauseous just a few feet from the television, the volume turned down to a whisper so my sleeping parents wouldn’t overhear. Since then I’ve been dra...
2021-05-27 23:07:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Stoker is a Gothic story in the truest sense of the word, the barren mansion in which most of its action takes place haunted not by spirits but by human inability to form connection, by the lingering ghosts of dead relationships and family secrets. Every common object is imbued with a co...
2021-05-26 16:18:33 +0000 UTC View Post
The Mimic is an odd little film, its pacing erratic, its characters thinly sketched and airless, its setting a slapdash mess in which none of its players are firmly situated. It leaps from scene to scene with manic energy, creating empty airtime like a Loony Tunes character revving up th...
2021-05-24 16:01:44 +0000 UTC View Post
The first time we see Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki), the troubled teenage antagonist of Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary 1988 animated sci-fi film Akira, he’s marveling at another boy’s motorcycle. We know it’s not the first time, either, because when daredevil punk Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) sho...
2021-05-19 16:07:51 +0000 UTC View Post
On paper, Craig Goodwill’s 2016 erotic thriller Compulsion sounds like exactly what I want out of a trip to the movies: elaborate costumes, psychedelics, graphic sex and violence, unreliable memories. In practice it’s a tepid swilling together of second-string catalog models and sens...
2021-05-17 18:43:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Mutilation is the mechanism by which torture compels its recipients. Our bodies recognize agony as a sign that soon our extremity will take on permanence, our body’s functions breaking down, ligaments severed, fingers cut away, skin hanging from raw flesh like ragged vestments. Mel Gibson’s <...
2021-05-12 03:47:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Venom has perhaps the most unearned face turn in all of film. One moment the titular symbiote (Tom Hardy) is snarling that Earth is going to be a game preserve for his people, and the next he’s telling Eddie Brock (Also Tom Hardy, sans CGI and vocal distortion) that sharing a body has ...
2021-05-11 14:37:50 +0000 UTC View Post