Film diary

Jaws 2 may be the best of the superfluous Jaws sequels, but it’s arguably the most boring. In its attempt to maintain the setting and tone of the flawless original, it’s mostly an unremarkable retread that seems resignedly cognizant of its own disposability.

For the second feature of a 28-year-old filmmaker, Jaws is an incredibly assured effort, and still every bit as terrifying as it was 40 years ago.

M Night Shyamalan is many things, but he is not a hack. His movies are dumb, but they are entirely his own, worlds that are not so richly imagined as they are distinctively contrived. Every character has an overwritten variation of Shyamalan’s own voice, rendering all dialogue conspicuously flat. Ludicrous premises and moments are carefully engineered with the bewildering expectation of generating pathos, shock, or delight. Even mainstream audiences seem to be confused as to… See more →

Recalling the confined paranoia of Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy, and, more recently, The Babadook’s exploration of grief and maternal anxiety, Under the Shadow is an effective chiller set in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s. When her husband is drafted by the military, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is left alone to care for her daughter as bombs fall on Tehran and her neighbors flee the city. Still stinging from a medical school rejection… See more →

House is the Japanese tween fever dream I never knew I needed to experience. Virtually every shot is highly stylized in a different way, each scene is more bonkers than the last, and there is very little sense to be made of any of it. It’s an exhausting but worthwhile investment.

Not the worst of the crowded early ’80s slasher field, but an artless entry all the same, straying from the playbook in all the wrong ways. Bloody Birthday is so enamored of its premise (essentially The Bad Seed cubed) that it can’t take its eyes off its pint-sized villains, which means we know exactly what they’re up to at all times. Some of their murderous mischief is for revenge, and some is indiscriminate, but absolutely… See more →

Hesher gorehounds will enjoy Deathgasm’s gleeful synthesis of metal lore and maximal carnage, but its blood-soaked slapstick lacks the imagination of the Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson classics that inspired it.

For a very silly mockumentary about vampire roommates, What We Do in the Shadows packs a lot of heart, even as said vampires are violently devouring the blood of their innocent victims. Their benign malevolence (and that of their werewolf nemeses) – bolstered by impressively committed special effects – is a rare and delightful alchemy, and one that generates a lot of laughs.

In 1967, Terence Young, director of several 007 movies, gave us Wait Until Dark, in which a blind woman is terrorized in her home by criminals who believe their contraband is hidden there. Its title, a command, refers both to its villains’ nocturnal scheming and to its heroine finding empowerment in her disability.

In 2016, Mike Flanagan, whose Oculus was a modest horror hit, gave us Hush, in which a deaf woman is terrorized in… See more →

In 2013, Edward Snowden provided proof that the American government’s scope of surveillance around the world – including its own citizenry – was even more massive and pernicious than most of us thought. The revelation landed, more or less, with a thud, largely because much of the news media focused more on the size of the leak than the substance of it.

This wasn’t without reason.

With the increasing overreach of the Patriot Act and… See more →

A strange slice of Reagan-era, juvenile delinquent nihilism, River’s Edge feels kind of like the unholy offspring of Stand by Me and Heathers, if said offspring had caught a few scenes of Blue Velvet before his parents sent him to bed. It is less colorful and more uneven than any of those films, stymied by an ill-fitting score and an excess of melodrama. For better or worse, Crispin Glover’s wholly deranged performance, presumably green-screened in… See more →

When we see the contrast between the values we share and the realities we live in, that is the fundamental foundation for social change.

If you have a shaky grasp of economics and want to better understand the growing problem of income inequality in the U.S., you probably can’t do much better than Inequality for All, an exhibition of the collected insights of former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. Reich’s affable oratory and knack… See more →

I might have watched this sooner if I had known it was Zack Morris fan fiction.

Come on, Mundruczó, it can’t be that hard to get Baha Men on the phone these days.

1. I was not at all invested in any of the characters (nor did I find the villain even mildly intimidating), despite the fact that they were introduced over thirty years ago in one of my favorite movies. The great J.K. Simmons gives the only enjoyable performance, and it’s wasted on a throwaway character.
2. I usually roll my eyes a bit at nostalgic, anti-CGI Luddites, but this is one of those films that completely validates their… See more →