Escape from the Bronx

Filho is really good at setting a scene and immersing you in a time and place, and just as I was with the titular town in Bacurau, I was fascinated by The Secret Agent’s recreation of Recife during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s. There are so many details and characters, and I didn’t mind that many of them are superfluous to the plot. I also didn’t mind that the plot really takes… See more →

what emotional malfunction makes me so relish being brutalized in this way

With the exception of Hollow Man, Paul Verhoeven’s studio sci-fi extravaganzas are all slathered in sociopolitical satire, and this one is arguably the most overt, with Verhoeven, recalling his childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, saying in an interview:

If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me. So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything… See more →

It’s still a sad mystery how the Philly screening(s?) of Eno, a groundbreaking documentary about famed musician and producer Brian Eno, came and went early last year without crossing my radar. I’ve met the filmmakers, Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, on various occasions in the past and would have loved to say hi and get eyes on Brain One, the generative engine they built for the film, with hardware designed by Teenage Engineering. As the… See more →

None of the tunes and few of the faces and stories in this doc will be unfamiliar to thrash aficionados, but as someone who always felt a strong connection to the music and no connection at all to the beer-soaked mayhem that fueled it, I was most interested in the glancing references made to the adults in the room, some of whom were new to me. Metal Blade Records honcho Brian Slagel; Ruthie’s Inn proprietor/promoter… See more →

After seeing the film, I watched Kane Parsons’s entire Backrooms series on YouTube. Though there are some tells here and there that it’s the work of a teenager (and one who’s played a lot of Portal), he’s clearly a prodigious talent, and it’s easy to see why A24 scooped him up to make a feature. Parsons didn’t invent the Backrooms concept—essentially an empty (or is it?), windowless, inescapable yellow maze of a corporate campus—and I’m… See more →

This movie’s not for me, and there is so much of it, but Lord and Miller’s reliable charm sustained me even if it didn’t satisfy me. Some science nerd has probably mansplained why they didn’t visibly age Ryan Gosling like they did Sandra Hüller, but I will continue to disapprove.

This franchise took a left turn when a weird cult in blonde wigs showed up at the very end of last year’s adequate-at-best 28 Years Later. It was a conspicuously goofy addendum, and it feels even less natural when the psychotic, Teletubbies-obsessed cult takes center stage in this direct sequel, roaming the post-apocalyptic British countryside looking for un-zombified victims to carve up in Satanic sacrifice. Elsewhere on the island, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, both… See more →

I had a great time with this one. I wish I had gotten it together to see it in a crowded theater. I also wish its office politics were less generic, and that its crummy digital effects weren’t one more drop in the ocean of reasons I’m convinced computers were a mistake. But man, it had been way too long since we had a fresh opportunity to picture Sam Raimi cackling from behind the camera… See more →

I’m known to enjoy a film made by clumsy amateurs reaching for something beyond their means, and this unfathomably earnest love letter to the beach towns of Delaware is definitely that. But even if its many perplexing choices provoke the occasional chuckle, its failed attempts to mine drama from Holocaust survivors, homophobia, and sexual assault make it cringeworthy in all the wrong ways. To make matters worse, it has a character named Gallagher who doesn’t… See more →