New York
State archive / 417 posts
The Hateful Eight
Creed
Anomalisa
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
As I’ve mentioned before, I am wary of the seductive power of nostalgia. The original Star Wars trilogy loomed so large in my generation’s childhood that any meaningful attempt to revive it was going to be met with uncritical optimism. So as I cheered along with a packed theater on the opening night of The Force Awakens, I remembered that I had done much the same thing sixteen years earlier for The Phantom Menace, which,… See more →
Spotlight
On an emotional level, the aspect of Spotlight that had the biggest impact on me was its journalists’ team dynamic, and the team’s (mostly) unfailing trust in each other to do the job right, even in the middle of the highest-stakes investigation of their careers. In a discussion about the film, this was described with a colloquialism I hadn’t heard before, and which I found too perfect not to make a note of here: competence… See more →
Room
Low
It’s been a shitty week, but luckily @lowtheband came to town tonight to wash off the muck.
Mutant Scum
Stevie Wonder
As Mondays go, it turns out that the one where you get to see a free, surprise Stevie Wonder show is a winner.
Failure & Hum
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
2015 US Air Guitar Eastern Conference Finals
Contemporary Color
Heading into my second and final taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Colin Stetson & Sarah Neufeld
The Damned
The Damned is an odd crossbreed of outlaw biker film, love story, and atomic-age science fiction, and this unlikely amalgam allows the film to give equal time to several of the Western Bloc’s competing attitudes about the Cold War era.
In the idyllic seaside town of Weymouth, King (Oliver Reed) and his gang of delinquents, The Teddy Boys, spend their days terrorizing tourists. After becoming one of the gang’s victims, the affluent Simon (MacDonald Carey)… See more →
Refused
Iron Reagan
Ex Machina
@chambermonster stalking the Huxtables
Mad Max: Fury Road
Faith No More
Vertigo
Liturgy
It Follows
What a difference a shift in perspective makes. David Robert Mitchell’s directorial debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, was a pensive coming-of-age drama that showed promise but was ultimately defeated by its own one-note sotto voce. With It Follows, Mitchell takes on the same themes much more successfully by funneling them through a simple but ingenious horror premise: the carrier of a sexually-transmitted curse is slowly but relentlessly pursued by a malevolent, shape-shifting being… See more →
Maps to the Stars
They Live
Big Trouble in Little China
Wussy
Goodbye to Language
Scowl
Inherent Vice
There are many enjoyable moments in Inherent Vice’s drug-addled noir, most of them occurring between Joaquin Phoenix’s hippie P.I. and Josh Brolin’s crooked cop. As a whole, though, the stupor the audience is made to share with the protagonist renders the intricacies of the hardboiled plot largely impenetrable. That bewildering effect is fitting but unsatisfying.
Swans
Foxcatcher
Creature from the Black Lagoon
The Manitou
The Devil's Rain
Blood and Roses
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors
Rituals
The Food of the Gods
The Vampire's Coffin
Bride of Frankenstein
The Phantom of the Opera
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
