Review

Obviously the music is great, and I like that Richard Lester was able to make something so formally daring out of what would otherwise have been rote idolatry. Its kinetic energy simultaneously encapsulates early Beatlemania’s rapture (for the kids) and chaos (for everyone else). That said, the movie, which is essentially plotless, lives and dies by the band’s offstage antics. Their irreverence may have been revolutionary at the time, but its presumed charm was almost… See more →

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Tonight I’m finally seeing @IronMaiden for the first time. All it took was for them to play two blocks from my apartment.

A strange homage/parody of occult and hippie films from the ’60s and ’70s, overloaded with wishy-washy neopaganism and boneheaded musings on heterosexuality and patriarchy. My best guess is that it wants to be some kind of feminist Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but apart from offering an excuse for the wardrobe department to go for broke, I can’t really figure out why this film exists.

An interesting profile for the uninitiated, but in its cursory understanding of chess, it makes little effort to understand Magnus’s genius, which remains enigmatic as ever. While Magnus the man has had an outsize role in inspiring a new generation of young chess players, Magnus the film fails to depict the game as anything but arcane.

Though it does little to distinguish itself from the untold thousands of horror cheapies that litter the streaming landscape, The Evil Within has a certain undeniable flair, even if you don’t know it was the singular obsession of a millionaire meth addict who spent 15 years and vast sums of his own money to make it. “Outsider art” doesn’t quite do it justice. Unlike the bewildering writing of Neil Breen or Tommy Wiseau, writer/director Andrew… See more →

Plot-wise, Hounds of Love is in many ways a fairly by-the-numbers kidnapping / serial killer movie. But after a first act that hews uncomfortably close to crass, skin-crawling exploitation, its character development and attention to style are able to set it apart from less compelling grindhouse fare. Its success in those departments is noteworthy: Emma Booth’s fragile performance has rightly received a lot of praise, and the cinematography and score work well together to create… See more →

At the end of In a Lonely Place, when Capt. Lochner calls to announce Dix Steele’s vindication and (needlessly) apologize for his persistent investigation of Dix as a murder suspect, Laurel Gray tearfully responds, “Yesterday, this would have meant so much to us. Now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” This suggests that the strain of the murder investigation was the catalyst for her love affair with Dix unraveling, as if it might… See more →

To be a good character animator, one must also be a good actor, and animation, typically an exaggerated abstraction of reality, tends toward appropriately exaggerated performances. Though they’re often capable of exuding enough warmth and humanity to inspire genuine empathy, their reliance on gestural extremes usually keeps them from being as relatable as a skilled actor made of flesh and blood. Kubo and the Two Strings, whose every frame boasts a visual imagination – both… See more →

If any kids out there want to know about white America in the ’80s without the burden of understanding white America in the ’80s, The Wraith is your delightfully dumb one-stop shop.

A Metallica concert in 2017 is pretty unnecessary but I went anyway and my main takeaway was that Lars’s drums were purple and sparkly.

Wall-to-wall joy at the Revolution show tonight. I never got to witness the man himself, but I’m so glad I got to at least do this.

Absent its jaw-dropping stage performances, Purple Rain is a weak film. And yet, there is something about the stilted drama of its narrative that elevates those stage performances, giving Purple Rain the peculiar distinction of being stronger for the inclusion of its weakest moments. Its otherwise clunky character development is lent a certain cohesiveness when expressed musically. The unconvincing relationships and turmoil established in various poorly-staged, non-musical moments somehow manage to make the already-amazing songs… See more →

Medicine.

Alice Lowe was already well into her pregnancy when she was approached to make a film, and she managed to write, direct, and star in Prevenge before she gave birth, which is amazing. And there’s a lot to admire about its surrealist fusion of horror, comedy, and drama. But the final product doesn’t quite hang together.

Jordan Peele’s uncommon wit, keen perspective on racial identity, and perfect cast are unfortunately no match for Blumhouse’s insistent blandness.

A magnificently dark crime thriller with equal attention paid to tense plotting and nuanced characterization, spread out across a sizable and capable ensemble. The urban underworld of The Asphalt Jungle is as vivid as it is bleak.

Talk about an unreliable narrator. Powered primarily by a single interview, Author: The JT LeRoy Story gives Laura Albert carte blanche to frame as she pleases her decade of hoodwinking the literary world. And yet, the skepticism her story provokes is eclipsed by how engrossing it is, providing canny insight into how she was able to pull off such a stunt in the first place.

Albert is a masterful and enigmatic storyteller, and one whose… See more →

Apatow productions have a habit of reveling in the pathetic frailty of maleness, and in a way that usually doesn’t do much for me. Superbad, the apotheosis of the form, an effortless synthesis of vulgarity and tenderness, is the one that finally reached me. Every time I see it, I laugh until I cry, and then I laugh some more.

I’m amazed this role wasn’t written specifically for Isabelle Huppert, because no one else on the planet could have pulled it off.

This is exactly as corny as it looks.

Dear Fictional Military,

You’ve got a tough job, I know. Your presence in any story is inescapably political. You are either a condemnation of our instinct for violence or a celebration of our defense of Freedom, with little opportunity to exist somewhere in between. You have to balance your duty to propel an artificial narrative with your duty to realistically portray the actual military, two things that are often at odds with each other. So… See more →

The first six words uttered in Rashomon summarize my feelings about the film’s universally fervid acclaim: “I don’t understand it at all.”

“A man was murdered,” says the priest, overcome with despair.

“Just one?” replies the commoner. I share his confusion.

In a world the priest describes as full of daily, devastating horrors, the crime at the center of Rashomon seems almost mundane. And yet, more so than even the rape and murder themselves, the… See more →

Mostly on the stupid side of silly, but it still beats Temple of Doom.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ambulance scene, an EMT says awkwardly to her charge, “I’m just gonna… check you.” She looks enough like Abbi Jacobson – a Philadelphia area native, like Split’s writer/director, M. Night Shyamalan – that it instantly becomes my favorite scene in the movie, a random cameo with Jacobson’s hapless Broad City character stumbling into an EMT job for which she is comically unqualified. But it’s not her. In her absence, the scene… See more →

A looser and more uneven amalgam of gags than I expected, which makes the coherence and emotional impact of its humanitarian rebuke of fascism – a system which, at the time, many Americans still regarded with curious optimism – all the more incredible.

When Ryan Gosling sings “City of Stars,” my ears editorialize it as “City of Cars,” but then he wins by making me wish I had nice hair too.

I’ll gladly acknowledge this was a bold debut for Errol Morris, training a genuinely curious eye on a variety of unglamorous characters in the orbit of the pet cemetery industry. Its willingness to keep the camera rolling through their lengthy and often unfocused tangents makes the film more interesting than if it had stuck rigidly to the topic at hand, and Morris’s straight-ahead style exposes a certain layer of everyday human vulnerability not often explored.… See more →

An Oedipal love triangle of professional liars is undoubtedly a concept worth mining, but The Grifters’s update of classic noir ultimately amounts to little more than stagey anachronism.

A love letter to a city I do not love, La La Land nevertheless did an impressive job of disarming me with its vivid palette and dazzling setpieces. It managed to seize on my love of music while circumventing my distaste for musicals.

Stray thoughts:

• Going all in on CGI Peter Cushing was a bold move, but more than giving Rogue One a through line to A New Hope, it serves as another reminder that the uncanny valley isn’t paved over just yet.

• The introduction of moral ambiguity to the otherwise black and white Star Wars universe is not unwelcome per se, but Cassian isn’t interesting enough to give it any real weight. (Really, none of the characters… See more →

Tonight I got to see Megadeth play in a room a little bigger than my apartment and it was very very great.

Though it’s not the masterpiece that John Carpenter would make 30 years later (which is apparently more faithful to the source material), The Thing from Another World is smart and tightly wound. The titular Thing is scarier in the imagination than on the screen, but its appearances, wisely, are few and brief. Tension is instead generated mainly by the conflict over whether the Thing should be studied or destroyed, and these scenes – dense with… See more →

Empty and ugly, The New York Ripper is content to have its inscrutable serial killer revel in the seediest corners of early-’80s NYC without the benefit of a remotely compelling narrative. It’s all cheap and no thrills, but I’ll give it some credit for being extremely skeevy, which I took to be its lone goal.

Exquisitely overdone in every respect, and entirely a product – and rebuke – of its time. This was clearly a lot of fun to make, is in turn a lot of fun to watch, and its theme song will get stuck in your head for weeks.

Opening with a newspaper headline about a murderous orgy, I thought this pre-Code thriller might be a bit more scandalous. Luckily, what it lacks in shocks it makes up for in unintentional farce.

If Hitchcock had a predilection for the supernatural, it might have looked something like Cat People. The suspense it creates in a few keys scenes – both in terms of their staging and the psychosexual premise that drives them – is among the boldest I’ve seen from 1940s-era horror.

The gags fly fast and furious in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but not nearly enough of them land. Compared to the duo’s electric “Who’s on First?” routine, the humor here is stilted.

Lon Chaney Jr, who embodies few of the characteristics of the traditional leading man, creates a character so apparently charismatic that his love interest is unfazed to learn he is an unapologetic peeping tom. But the real star of the show here is the cinematography, whose mist and moonlight cloak the misadventures of Chaney’s otherwise fairly silly werewolf in artful dread.

The initial appearance of Boris Karloff’s mummy is properly arresting, but most of what follows is a snooze.

Every aspect of Two Thousand Maniacs! exhibits a bare minimum of competence, and yet it is oddly unnerving, perhaps owing to how exuberantly its Grand Guignol spirit hurdles the boundaries of its era.

A group of estranged friends reunites at a dinner party hosted by Eden, who, since everyone last saw her, has joined a New Age cult with her new husband. As the evening wears on, Eden’s ex-husband, Will, grows increasingly paranoid that the cult means the group harm. Is he right, or is his judgement impaired by the overwhelming grief triggered by revisiting the house where his son died two years before? I was eager to… See more →

Shellac and Shannon Wright at the Bell House tonight. It was really really good.

For the second time, I’ve failed to be mindful of which version of a Mario Bava film I’m watching, this time with Evil Eye, the apparently inferior English-language recut of The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Fool me twice, shame on me. Evil Eye’s sumptuous black and white cinematography is a joy to behold, but its murder mystery is muddled by clumsy tonal shifts and an overbearing score.

The trouble with I Saw the Devil is that its cartoon characters do not inflict cartoon violence. The level of brutality on display might be affecting if accompanied by actual gravitas, but it’s impossible to feel deeply for any of the characters because there is so little to them.

It’s not hard to understand a man’s desire for revenge after his wife is murdered by a remorseless, barbaric killer, but the extreme shape his revenge… See more →

In Jaws: The Revenge, Ellen Brody becomes convinced that the various, oversized sharks that have tormented her family over the last twelve years are somehow associated, or organized, or something. Whether Brody is wrong or right, there’s some fun potential in the concept. However, despite going so far as to hint that she may even have some kind of psychic connection with the shark du jour, Jaws: The Revenge doesn’t commit to its lunacy, and… See more →

Jaws 3 boasts the hokiest special effects of the entire series. Since those effects are apparently its reason for being (its original title was Jaws 3-D), and relatively little effort was exerted elsewhere in the production, this one is probably best viewed in 3-D with expectations kept low.

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 →