Film

Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.

At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual… See more →

I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.

There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →

I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.

Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to… See more →

I was once again unable to make it to the animation festival in Ottawa this year, and the Philadelphia Film Festival once again filled some of that gap with a well-curated program of shorts. I’m feeling pretty raw lately about a variety of big things both personal and global, and several of these films collectively poked at all those things, so while I don’t regret attending, I did come away from the screening more emotionally… See more →

In keeping with this year’s ad hoc and mostly lowbrow Robtober, and since most of the Purge movies are available on streaming services I currently have access to, I’m reluctantly giving them a go. I didn’t hate this one any less than the first time I saw it; it’s perhaps the low-water mark of boneheaded Blumhouse mediocrity, with a kindergarten-level attempt at social commentary, cut-rate cinematography, and the most irritating villain this side of Martin… See more →

We’ve reached the “am I the asshole” stage of my reproachful trudge through this franchise, as Terrifier 3 ostensibly comes ever closer to the sort of 1980s genre trash that’s always warmed my contaminated heart. Its Silent Night, Deadly Night homage is unmistakable, its anamorphic cinematography nails the era’s unpolished 35mm aesthetic, and its uninhibited gore gleefully actualizes what all those VHS boxes on my local West Coast Video’s horror shelves always promised but rarely… See more →

In “Homie the Clown,” a fan-favorite Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson goes to clown college. The lessons he receives in baggy pants, balloon animals, and tiny bicycles were probably not drawn directly from the curriculum of an existing clown college, but they at least evince an awareness that such institutions actually exist.

In an adjacent hemisphere of the late 20th century entertainment world, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, a gonzo B-movie throwback, mines campy scares from… See more →

Another practical effects showreel barely disguised as a movie featuring the maniacal killer Art the Clown, a try-hard whose yearning to be a horror icon is as plain (and plainly mortifying) as our Commander in Chief’s yearning for a Nobel Prize. Despite the fact that Art, after being introduced gearing up Rambo-style in an unearned montage, indulges in some hacksaw shenanigans nasty enough to arouse the kind of guy who owns more than one Cannibal… See more →

It seems as though Terrifier is the slasher franchise of the moment, with 2024’s third installment reportedly becoming the highest grossing unrated film of all time, so it’s time once again for me to hold my nose and commune with the zeitgeist.

You’d be forgiven for assuming Terrifier’s stabby antihero, Art the Clown, was the product of an 11-year-old Fangoria subscriber’s very first ChatGPT prompt, but Art actually made his debut in a 2008… See more →

I always assumed there must be something transcendent about this 1980 live-action Popeye adaptation, seeing as a) it sure seems like a really dopey idea, b) there was nothing in Robert Altman’s critically admired oeuvre at that time (or since) to suggest he was the obvious guy to direct it, and c) it was the brainchild of Robert Evans, who produced The Godfather and Chinatown. Could it really be as artless a ploy as, “We… See more →

One of the best random laughs I’ve had in the last few years was at a “Remember when RoboCop shot that dude in the dick” t-shirt, and this fever dream of a comedy collaboration is a kind of spiritual sibling of that shirt, especially since it really goes for broke in reimagining that particular moment. All of RoboCop’s 60 scenes are remade by different people, often sketch comedy troupes, and while they don’t all… See more →

I remember getting MGM’s This Is Spinal Tap DVD when it was released in 2000 and being giddy at all the special features. The deleted scenes were longer than the movie, revealing that a ton of great stuff was sacrificed in the service of making the final cut an essentially perfect comedy. But alas, while watching Spinal Tap II, I shuddered to think what was on the cutting room floor, because the vast majority of… See more →

A pretty surface-level look at abstract painter Mary Heilmann, generally more interested in how many cool artists she hung out with and galleries she worked with than in what motivated her actual work.

Constraints are absolutely critical to my own creative process, and I’m more accepting than I used to be of process being part of (or maybe all of) what a creative work is about, as opposed to merely being a means to an end. So I can appreciate the bargain at the heart of origami: A sculptural form is created entirely from folding a single square of paper, with no other materials involved.

I do, however,… See more →

When Fire Walk with Me came out, everyone hated it, and now everyone loves it, and I’m the guy in the middle.

I don’t mind so much that it doesn’t really offer any details on Laura Palmer’s final days that weren’t already covered in Twin Peaks, and I appreciate that it gives us the chance to directly empathize with Laura’s perspective for the first time. But I’ve always found her more compelling as a spectral… See more →

Weapons has a good summer mystery/thriller premise—an entire class of third graders disappears individually from their homes one night—and thankfully the grating little-kid voiceover filling in the backstory gets out of the way soon enough. What follows is a master class in Magnolia-style nonlinear plotting, with a variety of character POVs across the same timeline unfolding one by one, each new angle making the mystery weirder, scarier, and—crucially—funnier.

As this is not some Lynchian… See more →

• Mazowsze: Dwa serduszka
  Cold War, “a broken love story about broken people in a broken country,” is one of my favorite films of the last decade, and among all the great music it packs into its relatively short runtime, this mournful traditional Polish tune about a doomed love affair intentionally stands out. I’m partial to this choral version, but there’s also a great jazz version sung by Joanna Kulig later in the film.
• Pat Benatar:… See more →

I’m not sure I’ve seen quite this ratio of smart presentation to stupid content before.

I assumed this would be trashy and dumb, and it was, but I didn’t expect it to be such a hoot! It’s dialed to just the right level of self-aware camp and its surplus of plot twists are as hilarious as they are absurd.

Surely no movie in 2024 made use of more fabric than this one.

Around the one-hour mark, for about five seconds, I naively thought that just maybe I would be the first to describe this film as a pope opera. Maybe next time.

I watched a shitty VHS transfer on Tubi for a very appropriate extra layer of grime.

I only recently discovered this HBO miniseries from Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman, whose fictional narrative intersects in real time with the real-life 1988 U.S. presidential primary elections, and while its overall substance was clearly an influence on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing, I thought I’d note a few tidbits from Sorkin’s series that seem to be Tanner ’88 homages:

• Both series have a spare martial drumbeat over their “Previously on [this show]” intros
• Both… See more →

Embarrassing, tedious Scorsese wannabe shit. Thought it would be a fun watch on a lazy Sunday and quit halfway through. Blah.

Kinda wild to take in this tasty morsel of espionage competence porn on the same day it’s revealed that a cabal of U.S. cabinet secretaries accidentally invited the editor of a major magazine along for the ride when they planned a bombing using something they downloaded from the App Store.

My 2,000th film diary entry. 🙂

Gonna tell my kids this is A Complete Unknown

Cusack is a pro who knows how to gracefully navigate insipid interview questions, and I’m sure he wouldn’t do it if it weren’t a decent payday, but it was still kinda hard to watch him endure a post-screening Q&A with a local corporate rock radio DJ and a theater full of middle-aged nostalgia freaks.

Steak is Quentin Dupieux’s first feature film, which I enjoyed more than I expected considering that I don’t remember much liking Rubber, the film he made after it, when I saw it some 15 years ago. Steak’s comic beats, bizarro world of Clockwork Orange-tinged perpetual high school, and bumping electronic soundtrack all cohere into a satisfyingly absurdist satire of conformity, reminiscent at times of Yorgos Lanthimos’s more accessible moments. And it’s perfectly paced:… See more →

Boring and corny. Borny?

The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, Wallace & Gromit’s finest outings, have such a wonderful economy to them. They’re impeccably constructed, compact thrillers that fit a surprising amount of story into 30 minutes without ever feeling rushed. They accomplish this partly by never wasting a single shot, and also by maintaining a very limited cast of characters, which gives the audience space to properly soak in all the extraordinary attention to detail, including beautiful… See more →

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →

How Peter Fonda is not best known for this starring role as a tomato-averse alien with explosive ejaculate is something I will never understand

A solid adaptation, almost slavishly true to the book, with a nod or two to the second book, one of which is frankly silly (sorry dude, that disguise ain’t fooling anyone). Eliot Sumner, progeny of Sting, playing Freddie Miles doesn’t really work for me, though I have to appreciate the stunt casting of a nepo baby in the role of an old money bon vivant, and they do successfully render the character as deeply unlikable,… See more →

My first viewing of the 2022 Criterion edition, which trims about two minutes from the theatrical cut. Only nerds who’ve seen Miller’s Crossing a million times will notice any difference, but I am one of those nerds, and while most of the cuts probably tighten up establishing shots and such, I did catch at least four lines of dialogue that were excised, one of which is a real loss (“Jesus, Tom!”). I wish filmmakers would… See more →

They Drive by Night is really two very different movies glued together, and the Depression-era working class drama is probably the objectively better half, but the pulp pleasures of the murderous noir it turns into can’t be denied. This is entirely thanks to American treasure Ida Lupino, whose scheming femme fatale chews enough scenery for the entire cast and then some. Lupino was 22 at the time and looked even younger, and while it was… See more →

👋🏻 Hi, Gen X artist in full midlife crisis mode over here, so maybe take my rating with a grain of salt, because this film spoke to me very directly.

I adored Adam Elliot’s early shorts, up to and including his Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, but Memoir of a Snail, overloaded with schmaltz and details recycled from his previous films, seems to be methodically constructed to confirm any suspicion that he’s content to make a career of repeating himself and tugging shamelessly at shallow heartstrings.

Too bad the franchise police put all their fingers in the pie at the end, but this is otherwise a far better crafted film than it has any right to be.

So Paul Schrader made this somewhat elegiac Exorcist prequel, and the studio rejected it and hired Renny Harlin to preside over a rewrite/reshoot, which was released in 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning. And then that film’s poor critical and commercial performance led them to try to squeeze a few bucks out of a limited release of Schrader’s version less than a year later. And neither of the films is good. And I find the whole… See more →

The Scariest Skeleton

Mali Elfman, Pete Scalzitti IV (USA)

Tennis, Oranges

Sean Pecknold (USA)

Martyr’s Guidebook

Maksymilian Rzontowski (Poland)

It Shouldn’t Rain Tomorrow

Maria Trigo Teixeira (Portugal, Germany)

Horse Portrait

Witold Giersz (Poland)

Beautiful Men

Nicolas Keppens (France, Belgium, Netherlands)

A Crab in the Pool

Alexandra Myotte, Jean-Sébastien Hamel (Canada)

Bug Diner

Phoebe Jane Hart (USA)

Wander to Wonder

Nina Gantz (Netherlands, Belgium, France, UK)

Was Jerry Goldsmith the only person involved who was told the title of this film? His apocalyptic score is at 11 almost the whole time, but everything else about the film’s execution is relatively sedate, which is pretty weird considering the script includes a huge satanist rally in what looks like a volcanic crater, the systematic murder of hundreds of newborn babies, and the literal second coming of Christ. Sam Neill is probably as good… See more →

I watched The Omen in a double feature with The Exorcist, and in terms of overall sophistication, the juxtaposition does The Omen no favors, but it’s still a pretty fun ride, and it must be said that Satan siring a human child to clandestinely seize the world’s levers of power is a far more potent strategy for spreading evil than commandeering a tween’s body and making her throw up all over everyone.

I think I was in college when I first saw The Exorcist, by which time my resentment of the Catholicism I grew up with had calcified, and that undeniably colored my reception of the film, and still does. It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who lives in fear of a goat-man trying to lure everyone into a flaming cave of eternal suffering, and that mythology only gets sillier when viewed through the vaudevillian… See more →

You’d never know it from the title, but this movie is kiiiiiiind of sleazy.

Not quite as good as What Have You Done to Solange?, and the ending is anticlimactic, but still a great police procedural that never stops moving and gives plenty of screen time to its motorcycle maniac with an oversized meat cleaver. One of the rare occasions I kind of wish I had watched the English-dubbed version, which might have made the copious dialogue easier to follow.

George Lazenby is great, as is all the Venetian location shooting, but the murder mystery is extremely unsatisfying, and there’s not nearly enough indulgent giallo style to compensate (with the exception of Ennio Morricone’s music, but it seems like he really just wrote a couple of themes, which are reused ad nauseam). I didn’t love Don’t Look Now either, so maybe I’m just not a grieving-parents-in-Venice kind of guy.

The more it explains itself, the less interesting it is, but damn if it isn’t otherwise very well executed.

An experiment doesn’t need to have an explicit goal, but I’m still left wondering what writer/director Chris Nash hoped to accomplish with In a Violent Nature. Slasher movies are categorically shallow affairs, and framing one from the killer’s perspective doesn’t add depth, nor do its costs (like the eradication of suspense) outweigh its benefits (of which I’m struggling to name a single one). Its approach is novel, I’ll give it that, but only insofar as… See more →

I’ve decided Stranger (rhymes with hanger) is their family name, and when they show up at a barbecue, everyone is like “Ugh, who invited the Strangers.”

Having Helter Skelter as a primary inspiration doesn’t automatically make you a hack, but if your ultimate takeaway is limited to “Wouldn’t it be scary if a bunch of weirdos randomly attacked you in your home in the middle of the night?,” you’re probably a hack. Putting the attackers in “creepy” masks removes all doubt. (That said, I haven’t seen 2006’s Them since it came out, but I remember it using these same elements to… See more →