Review

Today I did that thing where I knowingly miss the point of the Met, whizzing past its vast collection of antiquities from around the globe in favor of a marquee exhibition of modern American painters. It was Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock this time, and by far the largest collection of either artist’s work I’ve ever had the privilege of viewing. I was especially keen to dig in on Krasner, as I’m as guilty as… See more →

I initially decided against Dr. Giggles tonight in favor of watching Dark Night of the Scarecrow, but when the doctor himself, Larry Drake, showed up in the very first scene in Scarecrow, I took it as an omen and made it a double feature. I got slightly more than I expected from Giggles (his demented giggling is truly infectious!), a video store staple I never got around to seeing in its early-90s heyday. I wonder… See more →

More than a few moments in Marina Herlop’s Dja Dja tempt me to call it the best Björk album since Vespertine, but Herlop packs far too compelling a range of ideas into this record to just leave it at that. Among other things, from my somewhat limited frame of reference for this sort of thing, I hear bits of the choir in Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell score, the vocal experiments of Mike Patton’s … See more →

I always assumed Lady Terminator was trying to piggyback on the success of James Cameron’s iconic film without bearing any real resemblance to it, so imagine my surprise when I witnessed a big chunk of its runtime explicitly copying scenes from The Terminator. But don’t worry, it’s a totally different movie because the Terminator is a lady this time, and she trades in the cyborg part for some Indonesian folklore involving vagina dentata.

I’ve wanted… See more →

Yes! Fumbling through the dark; ears twitching at every unidentified sound; scanning the environment for weapons, ammo, keys, exits, and most importantly, threats; hoping upon hope you’re prepared to face whatever misbegotten grotesquerie comes next in this spiraling nightmare. This movie gets it, making little reference to specific Resident Evil lore but still feeling very much like a Resident Evil game, without forgetting to be cinema in the process. And its quest-oriented plot is an… See more →

Of all the villains I’ve encountered in fiction, I’m struggling to think of one more loathsome than Strangers on a Train’s Charles Bruno. I don’t feel great about it, because any mid-century, gay-coded character deserves at least some empathy, but this spoiled momma’s boy is simply the worst. I don’t begrudge the movie version’s drastic simplification of Strangers, but Robert Walker’s portrayal of Bruno is so spot-on, I kind of wish Hitchcock could have… See more →

Indy the dog is indeed a very good boy. But everything else about the movie is pretty meh.

The many hours I spent with the first two Resident Evil games didn’t do my college GPA any favors, but the sweet spot they found between the immersive dread of a good zombie movie and the adrenaline rush of a good action/adventure game was a revelation. Two great tastes that taste great together, and they even threw in some fun puzzles while they were at it.

The series lost me when it veered into convoluted… See more →

My long overdue first visit to Lightbox Film Center’s new location in the Bok building after UArts’s untimely demise two years ago. I’m glad Bok’s massive old high school auditorium is available to them, and if they decide someday to do less esoteric programming, the room can hold a lot of people. Hopefully those people will be prepared for some discomfort, because the uncushioned wooden seats are not great! By now it seems like a… See more →

I’ve never really had any interest in John Grisham’s work, but for some reason we’ve been watching the film adaptations the last few Sundays, and this one might be my favorite so far! Sometimes a stacked cast giving its all to a twisty potboiler premise lands just right. Its supersaturated assembly feels very of its time, and while early-aughts pop culture isn’t a source of much nostalgia for me, I’m not entirely immune to the… See more →

I hadn’t heard of this one before its recent Blu-ray upgrade, and what a gem! It goes for broke pretty much from start to finish, with James Brolin rampaging through upper Manhattan and the Bronx as he hunts his daughter’s kidnapper, pounding his way through street gangs and crooked cops, leveling half the city in the process. In the 1970s-NYC-as-hellhole pantheon, I’d say it triangulates somewhere between Serpico, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three… See more →

In these early days of a post-BrooklynVegan world, who knows how long it would have taken for me to catch wind of Temptation to Exist, today’s surprise release from your best friend and mine, Andrew W.K., but thankfully my buddy Smo informed me via text early this afternoon, and I was spinning said release forthwith. Ever since Andrew cancelled all tour dates and deleted his website and social media almost immediately after releasing his last… See more →

The interviews get pretty repetitive in this rock doc about the post-“Smells Like Teen Spirit” feeding frenzy in Seattle, but they’re well worth sitting through for the film’s treasure trove of live footage of a ton of great bands from the scene who never hit the big time. Oddly enough, for as much as Hype! is about the Pacific Northwest, its most memorable moment for me is a bunch of Japanese rockabilly dudes with comically… See more →

I find that a terrible movie that broadcasts its amateur maker’s steep learning curve is usually more interesting than a terrible movie made by a professional for whom it was just another day at the office. And the more ambitious the amateur’s vision, the more compelling their failure. In the case of Almost Invisible, apparently the first and last writing/producing/directing effort of a 50-something MD (currently serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for running a… See more →

Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →

This thing is so overloaded with ridiculous ’80s signifiers, and its picture is so pristine, I initially thought it was a nostalgic throwback made sometime in the last 10 years (à la the dreadful Kung Fury). But the hair, the clothes, the cars, and the music are simply too perfect, and that pristine picture comes courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome, patron saints of pulling out all the stops on film restorations no one else would have… See more →

I’m not really into Christopher Nolan or epic movies, but my knowledge of Greek mythology is shamefully cursory, so I hoped seeing Nolan’s Odyssey would give me the nudge I needed to finally do some proper reading. I enjoyed the film more than I expected to; it’s very effective in many ways (Polyphemus! Circe!) and clunky in others (loud plot forecasting and a clumsy big finish), but I don’t think I looked at my watch… See more →

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 →

I’m not big on movies loudly foregrounding firearms these days, so I thought it might not be the best time to finally watch Hard Boiled, but I did it anyway, and even though it may be the single most trigger-happy movie I’ve ever seen, its effect is entirely different than what I’ve come to expect from most movies fitting that description. I read a review that derides Hard Boiled as less symphony than juvenile heavy… See more →

It might seem surprising that Brad Dourif’s intense and fascinating performance in Wise Blood didn’t get him much higher visibility in Hollywood, but it’s hard to imagine a more singularly challenging character for audiences than Flannery O’Connor’s anti-preacher, Hazel Motes, whose all-consuming contempt Dourif projects forcefully and without apology. If this film underwent test screenings, it seems to have refused to be influenced by them, with the possible exception of its ill-fitting, whimsical score, something… See more →

Based on Kenneth Fearing’s 1946 novel of the same name, The Big Clock was released in 1948, and Hollywood took a second swing at it with No Way Out in 1987. As I write this in 2026, another 39 years have passed and we’re due for a third iteration, which has me thinking. I was 11 when No Way Out came out, and though I hadn’t seen it before now, and it’s dated in many… See more →

A surrealist nightmare of expressionist lighting and skewed compositions made from colossal pre- and postwar European architecture, oppressive even when it’s beautiful, its sharp angles stuffed to the gills with detritus, evoking a civilization abandoned in a panic. Even the scenes with hundreds of extras feel lonely. It talks too much but my god does it look incredible.

Whatever the Exorcist II apologists may tell you, its legendarily scatterbrained attempt to rationalize the irrational is not something to aspire to, even more so if you’re unwilling to match its level of sheer lunacy. Supernatural mythology, especially in Eastern traditions, is a lizard-brain beast with little use for reason, but like that ill-advised Exorcist sequel, Ringu 2 attaches electrodes to its spooks, making a fairly simple story of ghostly revenge into a drawn-out thesis… See more →

In this Ringu sequel, which was released at the same time as the first film, almost every noteworthy survivor of the previous installment is killed off pretty much right away, and we soon start to learn that the series’s cursed-videotape shtick is a lot more complicated than everyone thought. The nature of that complication is revealed, as Hemingway would say, gradually, then suddenly, and I won’t spoil the cuckoo left turn it takes in the… See more →

Our protagonist finds a cursed videotape that kills the viewer a week after they watch it, so she starts using her skills as a journalist to get to the bottom of it, and then almost immediately hands the whole project over to her ex-husband so she can rest her little brain, because she is, after all, just a girl. Oh, and her ex is able to unravel the mystery in fairly short order due to… See more →

Matilda Lutz was the lead in this movie the same year she was the lead in Revenge, and I kind of wish I could do to this movie what she did to the dudes in that movie.

I was pretty unkind to The Ring when it came out in 2002, going as far as to make regrettable use of the R-word, and upon rewatching it a couple dozen years later, I was pleased to find myself both more amenable to its silly urban-legend premise and less intent on having a strong opinion about its unremarkable execution. The movie is nothing special, but it’s a perfectly inoffensive way to spend a rainy Saturday… See more →

“I’m not mad, just bewildered,” says Kate Beckinsale about halfway through Tiptoes, a deeply weird cinematic act of little-people advocacy. You might assume she’s talking to the agent who got her the lead in this well-meaning misfire, but the line is actually directed at Matthew McConaughey, who plays her fiancée, who as it turns out is the only Matthew McConaughey-sized person in his extended family, all of whom are otherwise affected by dwarfism. This includes… See more →

As is often the case in low-budget filmmaking, Killpoint is the underwhelming product of one guy spreading himself too thin, with main man Frank Harris writing, producing, directing, shooting, and editing. But he leaves the acting to the actors, and his stable is surprisingly deep (a cast of more than 100), if not all that skilled. Stilted performances are the name of the game, which is to be expected from the Hollywood hopefuls with empty… See more →

If you see only one motion picture featuring a pregnant teen being chased through the woods by a second pregnant teen with a kitchen knife, make it this one.

I only counted three crowns?

I like to think I’ve shaped my FOMO into a generally healthy force for good over the years, at least as regards my commitment to the arts, but it really let me down on this occasion, when it took me more than two months to accidentally discover this new album from an old favorite. Still, I’ll cut myself some slack on this one, as it was easy to lose track of Jesse Sykes in the … See more →

That the majority of the soulless thugs prowling the streets in this film are in their 30s and 40s initially took me out of it a bit, but that notable embellishment (along with at least one insanely cold-blooded murder) ultimately puts it far enough over the top to qualify as pure pulp bliss, as opposed to the ickier right-wing fever dream of Death Wish.

Donald James Parker has written no fewer than 18 evangelical Christian feature films since 2013, and he starred in most of them as well, including Gramps Goes to College. They say you should write about what you know, and Parker’s main character in this film—a retired computer programmer who played tennis as an undergrad and moves from South Dakota to Tennessee—is pulled directly from Parker’s own bio. Conspicuously fictional is the part where he goes… See more →

What a relief that this is not the uplifting sports drama it’s being sold as, but rather a properly stressful Safdie movie full of terrible people. Also, I’m not sure why every single pair of eyeglasses in this film is exquisite, but I’m all for it.

I decided to close out Christmas with the most sacrilegious thing within reach, but for all its cheekily provocative preoccupation with lust and power, Benedetta’s satire and sleaze are largely drowned out by a tedious veneer of prestige melodrama.

Massachusetts, I can’t say I miss ya.

A Grateful Dead cover band wouldn’t ordinarily get me out of the house, but a friend invited me, and the list of shows I’ve been to this year is depressingly short, so off I went. And I’m glad I did! I enjoy seeing something requiring a high level of skill done with a high level of competence, and so much the better if it’s in a passion-project capacity and an intimate environment like Ukie Club.… See more →

I didn’t have much access to TV during the heyday of To Catch a Predator, and while I was aware of the show, I don’t remember giving it much thought. I can’t say that anymore, thanks to this pensive documentary examining the show’s legacy, and I’m not surprised to learn I don’t find ritual humiliation masquerading as journalism to be entertaining or informative, regardless of who is being humiliated.

I’ve always been amazed Twin Peaks ever made it to air on network television in 1990, and its 2017 return, perhaps David Lynch’s most unfiltered vision, upped the ante on that amazement considerably, even in the streaming age of pricey prestige dramas. Has there ever been a creative work this vast and this weird with a production budget this big? Whatever you think of Lynch’s work, you have to admire his ability to carve out… See more →

This undoubtedly would have fared better in a packed theater than it did with me watching it alone at home, but I was pleasantly surprised it made me laugh out loud several times. Inevitably, its comedy feels conspicuously out of time, and I don’t think it’s on the level of the original, but I’m also not 12 years old anymore, and that’s not its fault. I spotted a couple very subtle sight gags, and I’m… See more →