Film

Like an 11-year-old boy on a Lucky Charms bender scribbled out a screenplay and then picked up the phone and hired legit Hong Kong action pros to make it. If anyone has ever shot anything more entertaining on location in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I have yet to see it (and would desperately love to see it).

I’m not a superhero enthusiast, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Spidey, maybe because his origin story, while admittedly rife with the tiresome trappings of adolescent male power fantasy, is at its core a coming-of-age tale. In that tradition, 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse allows its Spider-Man, Miles Morales, to not only find himself, but also find his tribe: a variety of spider-heroes, each representing a different far-flung dimension. The demographically diverse influx of… See more →

May we all achieve Bob Flanagan’s level of self-knowledge and self-love, even if it ultimately fails to prepare us to confront death. Bob’s poem, “Why?,” is going to stay with me. “Because you always hurt the one you love.”

I was due for a trashy true crime brain drain, and this one seemed like it would fit the bill. I didn’t expect much from it, but I never could have imagined the story of an extramarital affair culminating in someone getting hacked to bits with an axe could be such a snooze. It’s at least three times as long as it needs to be, heavily padded with repetition, superfluous characters and details, and a… See more →

I first saw (and loved) the Dimension Films cut of Police Story 3 when it was released in the U.S. in 1996. For years, I didn’t even know it was a sequel, since the American version was simply titled Supercop. Twenty-seven (!) years later, thanks to Criterion Channel, I’ve finally seen the original version, and the differences are fascinating.

• Score: I don’t remember much about the Dimension version’s score, but I do remember it being… See more →

As I mentioned in my 2022 year in review, I’ve developed a new habit over the past year as part of my creative practice—something I call a “field day.” Ideally at least twice a month or so, I’ll get out of the house for the day and absorb things in the outside world. It most often takes the form of visiting museums, galleries, and cinemas, but virtually any activity qualifies, as long as I’m out… See more →

I only made it through about 20 minutes of this, and I think the filmmaker’s vision is at present too underdeveloped to sustain a feature length, but I’d still much rather see more of this kind of unorthodox exploration than another round of rote Blumhouse banality.

Side note for my fellow graphic design pedants: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone miss the point of dot leaders quite so flagrantly as the opening credits of … See more →

I generally prefer to avoid Christian proselytizing and convoluted sci-fi but apparently if you put them together WE ARE IN BUSINESS

1. Act 1: Children savagely beating each other
2. Act 2: Children talking to each other on the telephone
3. Act 3: Children using the telephone to administer savage beatings

Don’t mind me, just starting off the new year with some quiet weeping over here

Maude

Leah and I became dog parents early in 2022, adopting a 15-pound, two-year-old Jack Russell / Chihuahua mix. Knowing Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned, we named her Maude, after the Bea Arthur character, who in 1972 was the first sitcom character to have an abortion. Living with Maude has been a big adjustment, but after getting over the initial hump, I’m not sure how we ever lived without her. She loves belly… See more →

It was as if National Review were running Criterion Channel. An art house streaming service with a foundation of conservative values, and somebody thought it would work. Or maybe they knew it wouldn’t, and that was the point. As I butted heads with virtually all of my colleagues, most of whom were also progressive-minded cineastes, I began to suspect the company had hired us just to tie up our expertise in a boondoggle. I wouldn’t… See more →

I’m not well versed in the Hong Kong school of “what if [title of recent successful American movie], but completely incoherent?,” but between Magic Crystal’s kung fu/E.T./Indiana Jones cocktail and Scared Stiff’s action/bromance/comedy take on Nightmare on Elm Street, I’m more than sufficiently compelled to investigate further.

I came for the stop-motion, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from bailing about halfway through. I assume there are more songs, and I’m not sorry to have missed them.

Why do all the Kansas City mafiosos in this have Brooklyn accents?

I genuinely appreciate when a movie I know is going to be wretched proves to be significantly worse than I thought possible, so I have no regrets, but this was truly painful all the same.

Happy Halloween! Here are a few quick notes about this year’s design for Robtober, my annual horror movie marathon.

The ransom letters

The ransom note concept for the title screen came to me in the middle of the night, and I don’t remember if it was inspired by something specific. But in my subsequent research, I read the entire Wikipedia article about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, so if that’s a knowledge hole your pub… See more →

After having to cancel my plans to attend last month’s Ottawa International Animation Festival at the last minute, I was glad the Philadelphia Film Festival’s animated shorts program gave me a chance to get my fix. This was a pretty solid collection of films, encompassing a variety of styles and narratives. The overall tone was fairly dark, which is always fine with me, but several of the films also made a habit of just stopping… See more →

The kind of thoroughly bonkers extravaganza that could easily elicit a bewildered “Well, that was certainly… a movie,” but the thing is, that response is actually pretty accurate and appropriately concise. This movie is more movie than almost any other movie, in that it embraces the form with such maximalist abandon as to leave it completely spent in just over an hour.

You know, after watching Watcher earlier in the day, I was like, “Maybe I’m just not a slow burn kind of guy.” And then Speak No Evil comes along to remind me how it’s done. This thing had its hooks in me from start to finish. It is cold-fucking-blooded. Obligatory warning: Parents of young kids might want to steer clear.

There’s a lot to like here. It’s stylish and warm and conveys an understanding of brutality without feeling the need to bludgeon its audience. It feels very Bacurau by way of From Dusk Til Dawn: a remote community in a poor part of the world, a certain mysticism, a pronounced genre shift in the final act. And its most important characters manage to breathe real humanity into shallow genre archetypes. It’s all just a bit… See more →

I’m all for the post-A24 let’s-get-gnarly thing, but can we please do it with some more imagination?

Every October, I broaden my cinematic horizons by putting together a big schedule of horror movies I haven’t seen yet. Alas, this year’s plans have been upended by my abduction, and for some reason, my mysterious captors aren’t interested in money. Instead, their ransom demand is that people watch the movies I’ve scheduled. These dudes seem like they mean business, so if you can help me out, I’d really appreciate it. But if you’re too… See more →

Relocating Philip Marlowe from 1940s Los Angeles to 1970s London is such a patently terrible idea that it’s no wonder no one involved in this seems to make much of an effort. But some contributions seem actively intent on dragging it down even further, most notably the tacky TV movie aesthetics and Candy Clark’s embarrassing, absolutely ridiculous take on Camilla (née Carmen) Sternwood. Awful.

Many years in the making, Mad God is the stop-motion passion project of special effects legend Phil Tippett, best known for his pioneering work on Star Wars, RoboCop, Jurassic Park, and others.

Tippett cites Karel Zeman’s revered collage aesthetic as a primary inspiration, but I see a lot more of the Quay brothers in Mad God, or at least the grotesque brand of Street of Crocodiles worship seen in Adam Jones’s early Tool videos. While… See more →

This is essentially a six-hour Vox explainer video—sans cute graphics and podcast cadence—shoehorned into a drama. Like The Wire before it, it excels at unpacking long-festering issues in the American criminal justice system, making a product that’s both coherent and cogent out of a complex story on a non-linear timeline. But all the information it wants to convey and all the points it wants to make are spoken rather plainly, which may make it successful… See more →

If you have a thing for endless closeups of extremely filthy bare feet, have I got the movie for you

I was never brave enough to ask what would make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? an even more fraught experience, but yeah, putting it under an authoritarian regime does the trick.

I had seen theatrical screenings of The Godfather maybe two or three times before, and while the blemishes on those aging prints may have spoken to the ruin-porn enthusiast in me, there’s no denying they were a distracting real-world intrusion on a landmark work of fiction. For the 50th-anniversary restoration, it’s tempting to include the standard caveat about the magic inherent in film projection that’s lost in digital projection, but I’ve never been more convinced… See more →

I’ve never been less worried about Steve-O, and it feels good.

There’s at least a handful of late-’70s genre oddities that somehow wrangled stylish production and bankable stars in support of truly bizarre ideas. If one of them were to really nail that art-damaged-big-budget-B-movie alchemy, it could be the holy grail of weird cinema, and I hold out hope that such a thing exists. But until it surfaces, I’ll continue to be mildly disappointed by The Visitor, The Manitou, Altered States, et al: amazing trailers that… See more →

It’s hard to square the twisty pulp charm of the whodunit with the relentless emotional sadism of the drama—virtually every character who isn’t hopelessly broken at the beginning is hopelessly broken by the end—but I definitely don’t regret watching, so I guess it’s well-crafted enough to have it both ways.

I could never have believed how boring this is if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

Let me begin by saying I promise this post is mostly good vibes. Skip ahead if you like, but if you’ll momentarily indulge my pessimism: What a stupid time to be alive.

2021 was supposed to be the year the vaccine gave us our lives back, and while it did for some of us to some degree, its international distribution predictably favored wealthy nations, and the long-simmering anti-vax movement here in the wealthiest nation of… See more →

I was pretty excited for this one. Emma de Swaef, Marc Roels, and Niki Lindroth von Bahr are doing the most interesting work in narrative stop-motion animation today, and while the bizarre nature of that work probably precludes it from attracting much more than a cult following, having some Netflix money thrown at it hopefully bodes well for its sustainability.

The House’s first segment, a fable about a 19th century family selling its soul,… See more →

Look, I’m here for the action. As much as the Matrix series is an enjoyable alchemy of classic mythology, cyberpunk, and pop philosophy, anyone who says the action isn’t far and away its biggest strength is kidding themselves. The increasingly convoluted technological underpinnings, the endless rumination on the paradox of free will, the paper-thin character work—it’s all set dressing for some extraordinary fight and chase sequences, bolstered by visionary special effects. Or at least it… See more →

I had a Hitch itch, wanted something short, and hadn’t seen Rope in ages. Perfect, right? Totally forgot about the one-shot schtick until it started, and man, I’ve never found it less impressive. The movie mostly looks like shit: The Technicolor is weirdly drab, and the plot is dialog-driven to the point that the roving camera tends to just flatly center the speaker in the frame. The limited edits do give the proceedings the effect… See more →

A decent profile of Kenny G and his position as a uniquely polarizing figure in music, but not nearly as probing as it could be. For a much deeper dive into the notions of “good” and “bad” music, I highly recommend Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

The final episode of this is scarier than any horror movie in recent memory.

When I last saw this 25 years ago, I responded with some kind of wannabe film snob shit—I don’t remember if it was for or against—and my girlfriend at the time was, correctly, not having it. This time, probably still unjustifiably, I feel assured enough in my snobbery to say that the visuals in this movie are distractingly bland. Apart from a few dramatic camera swoops here and there, the colors and compositions reflect all… See more →

I know, I know, you’re probably like, “Oh great, yet another martial-arts-infused ripoff of E.T. and Indiana Jones where the MacGuffin is a telekinetic rock that loves to eat ice cream,” but hear me out

Come to see Marilyn Monroe become the Marilyn Monroe, stay to see the beautiful Niagara Falls backdrop and a Technicolor spin on great noir cinematography. The final act is a dud, but Jean Peters is such a badass, I almost didn’t notice. And comic relief in the form of coked up shredded wheat salesmen is such a weird play, I can’t help but respect it.

From the kitschy way it introduces itself, I fully expected unadulterated camp, but for some reason, Bob Balaban directs Parents with an almost completely straight face, giving center stage to some unwatchable dead-eyed kid who sleepwalks his way through the entire film. (Unsurprisingly, this is that kid’s sole acting credit.) It’s a long 80 minutes.

THIS MOVIE IS FUCKING INSANE

Robtober is what I call the horror movie binge I do every October. After I redesigned my site in 2017, I started documenting the event each year with a horrifically custom-designed blog post, getting a little more elaborate each time. This post goes behind the scenes of the 2021 edition.

The data

I generate my site with Jekyll, and a custom-designed post like Robtober gets its own unique layout file. To keep things tidy, all the… See more →

Do yourself a favor and read up on Colonia Dignidad before watching this if you don’t want to feel like you got to class and found out too late that there was a homework assignment.

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

This year’s batch is a little less focused than usual, drawn from new releases, repertory screenings in Philadelphia, recent additions to Time Out’s “100 Best Horror Films,” Criterion… See more →

I gather that the first Ghoulies movie didn’t get its name until after it was made. They realized its little Gremlins wannabes are the best thing it has going for it, and I bet they wished they had pushed that button harder. Thankfully Ghoulies II takes full advantage of the opportunity to correct that error, roughly quadrupling their screen time and letting them terrorize a carnival. This movie is not remotely clever and it doesn’t… See more →

Ghoulies always felt like a glaring omission in my personal horror canon because it was one of the most memorable VHS boxes on display in the video store that was my second home in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And somehow I never noticed until now that the little green guy on that box is wearing an adorable half shirt and tiny red suspenders! Unfortunately he doesn’t wear them in the movie, so that’s… See more →

I wonder if everyone who’s so tickled that James Wan funneled big studio bucks into a kooky grindhouse premise would find similar delight in, like, Nickelback covering a Bad Brains song.