A rider in black (Wojciech Pszoniak) arrives at a convent in the midst of the Prussian invasion of Poland. In aspect he resembles a sort of living Repin painting, the wild-eyed tyrant of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 sprung to life. It’s his manic body language...
2021-02-19 16:12:37 +0000 UTC View Post
The opening of Impetigore, Joko Anwar’s riveting 2019 folk horror flick, establishes the relationship between twentysomething tollbooth workers Maya (Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita) with such breathless confidence that when the movie stops cutting back and forth between them at li...
2021-02-19 03:54:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Lanthimos’s whole thing, the magical realist worlds of flat affects and disorienting angles he assembles so meticulously in his films, is strong medicine by any measure. The Killing of a Sacred Deer pushes even deeper than its immediate predecessor, The Lobster, into the direc...
2021-02-18 00:40:07 +0000 UTC View Post
The script isn’t much, the score’s already departed entirely from my memory, and where the story isn’t bog-standard it sags and loses its direction, but Julius Avery’s Overlord scores considerable points for knowing exactly what it is. At no point does it attempt to escape its pu...
2021-02-17 02:50:31 +0000 UTC View Post
“...political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!.” As twenty-one-year-old Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton, Daniel Kaluuya delivers the famous revolutionary’s words with a smooth, flu...
2021-02-15 06:53:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Women in dresses of red and blue roughspun sing beneath branching webs of yarn drawn taut and interwoven. A painting of a long-haired man’s face stares Christ-like from the side panel of a rusted caravan. What are we to make of this pastoral cult, all slender women — all but one of whom are w...
2021-02-12 15:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Being a fat woman is an exercise in learning to love things that hate you. Your favorite art will mock your body, your lovers will quest vainly for compliments that don’t engage your actual appearance, theater seats will bruise your hips, and on, and on, and on until the grating whine of the wo...
2021-02-12 04:43:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Space Sweepers is not, as some critics would have it, “Parasite in space”, an assertion so transparently racist in its flattening of one of the most fruitful national cinematic cultures of the century that it merits little discussion. Jo Sung-hee’s sci-fi action flick may ...
2021-02-10 06:50:31 +0000 UTC View Post
How I made it this far in life without seeing DePalma’s Scarface is a pretty good question, but man, there’s nothing in the world like Al Pacino in this movie. He’s like a speak-n’-spell having a psychotic break, his slack facial expression and robotic, repetitive way of talking ...
2021-02-08 07:40:05 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something about Alison Brie’s enormous Betty Boop eyes that’s always read as slightly upsetting to me. There’s just so much area; the idea of something touching their wet, glistening surfaces is too immediate. In Horse Girl, which she co-wrote with director Jeff ...
2021-02-05 08:04:34 +0000 UTC View Post
That American society cannot weather a respiratory pandemic is no longer something that can take an audience by surprise. Even so, the bleak, spare, tightly-built engine of Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night feels imperative rather than obsolete, digging its fingers into the paper-t...
2021-02-05 06:19:02 +0000 UTC View Post
You seldom see a film approach self-harm with the understanding that it serves a purpose. When we cut and burn and prick and beat ourselves, it’s because no other release is conceivable or accessible. It’s an escape from the cloying physical prison of panic, of suicidal spiraling, of flurryin...
2021-02-03 02:04:06 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s seldom I get the chance to sit down and watch something every frame of which is absolutely visually riveting. It’s enough to make me glad for Ash Is Purest White’s glacial pace and tone, content to sit and watch as director Jia Zhangke and cinematographer Eric Gautier glide th...
2021-02-01 07:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
How do you take a premise like the lycanthrophy-afflicted son of a land baron feeding off his father’s tenants and totally fail to do anything approaching class analysis? Whatever the secret to that particular trick, Eight for Silver knows it. It takes a setup perfectly primed to take ...
2021-01-31 07:14:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Pornography—notoriously difficult to define, its moral weight and cultural impact bitterly contested not just by prudes and lewds but by opposing factions within movements like feminism—has always been a dicey subject for discussion. Is it art or exploitation? Does it objectify women or empow...
2021-01-29 22:47:38 +0000 UTC View Post
In film, faces and bodies are part of a visual language which communicates the nature of a fictional world. Take the smooth, generically beautiful faces of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which notably includes seven movies headlined by tall, muscular white men named “Chris.” Outside the realm...
2021-01-29 16:51:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Any movie with the balls to cast Quentin Crisp (incidentally a trans woman who never transitioned) as Elizabeth I is a movie I can’t help but root for, and Sally Potter’s Orlando uses it just as its jumping-off point. By the fifteen-minute mark we’ve seen royals titter at the spect...
2021-01-29 00:30:04 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something so distinctly dykey about Ammonite, something in its obsessive focus on labor and chores, on feet and piss and clothes and all the things we half-understand to be proxies for the elusive concept of the beloved which hews closer to The Duke of Burgundy with it...
2021-01-23 04:50:50 +0000 UTC View Post
The first half of 3 Women, Robert Altman’s 1977 avant garde classic, is perhaps the most stressful thing I’ve ever watched. The friction between Shy, submissive Pinkie Rose (Sissy Spacek) and vapid, self-absorbed Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) is nails on a chalkboard, Millie’s...
2021-01-22 17:51:57 +0000 UTC View Post
Rival crews meet by night in an abandoned warehouse. At issue is some unknown valuable, possessed by one side and desired by the other, and when no solution is forthcoming the two gangs quickly discover that neither of them called the sitdown. Tempers flare. Guns come out. Then, at the precipice ...
2021-01-20 20:38:53 +0000 UTC View PostThey rise from the long grass beside the river as the merchant and his men go by, one leading an ox laden with bags of rice, dried herbs, salt, and spices, and clay pots full of what smells to the hunters like liquor, strong and good. The beast shakes her head in irritation and flicks her tail to...
2021-01-17 20:49:47 +0000 UTC View Post
A rancid little mother/daughter drama stretched out over two centuries and told in overlapping, contradictory skeins of personal narrative, Byzantium follows Clare/Clara/Camilla Webb (Gemma Arterton in the only role I’ve ever really loved her for) and her daughter Eleanor (Saorise Rona...
2021-01-17 00:25:28 +0000 UTC View Post
The image of the crying dad is ubiquitous in popular culture, a kind of archetypal psychological upset within the framework of the American nuclear family which robs a child of the illusion of their father’s invulnerability. The second layer of horror present in this image, though, is that the ...
2021-01-16 15:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a moment in Alucarda, Juan López Moctezuma’s 1977 cult lesbian horror classic, where garish melodrama spills into bitter reality. From the top of a ponderous stone staircase the titular novice lashes out with her Satanic powers, engulfing the nuns and friars who tormented he...
2021-01-15 17:30:31 +0000 UTC View Post
That this movie exists at all is baseline grotesque. John Landis killed a man and two children through his own arrogance and negligence while filming part of the Twilight Zone movie, and here’s his son Max consciously invoking the famous series entry ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ with...
2021-01-14 20:08:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes it feels like Deadwood never happened. With shows like Maniac and Bojack Horseman dominating conversations about mental illness in TV, it’s easy to forget that back in 2004 David Milch’s bloody, profane gold rush period piece broke trail on some of the mos...
2021-01-12 20:12:15 +0000 UTC View Post
You’d have to be a pretty insightful and knowledgeable artist to do something worthwhile with the story of Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas — her childhood nickname and eventual use-name among early English colonists in what is now Virginia. Terrence Malick is not that artist. As a film hi...
2021-01-08 16:30:00 +0000 UTC View Post
How do you talk about a movie with such insight into sexual predation when its creator is himself a sexual predator? Roman Polanski’s Repulsion mines even closer to the lode of its director’s real-life behavior than the better-known Rosemary’s Baby, a case not of staggerin...
2021-01-02 04:04:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Tokyo Decadence, Ryū Murakami’s 1992 pink film, opens with submissive prostitute Ai strapped into a modified OBGYN’s chair as her sadist client waxes poetic about her status as the savior of Japanese womanhood, her sole qualification for which appears to be that he has sexual access...
2021-01-02 03:19:02 +0000 UTC View Post
The giant mecha genre is, at its heart, a teen power fantasy. Step into a cockpit and suddenly your body is a hundred times larger, armored and invulnerable. You can fly through space, dodge missiles, and cut starships in half with swords made of diamond-edged light. Nothing can stop y...
2020-12-28 21:37:05 +0000 UTC View Post