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Real TNT-in-the-afternoon vibes, the aura of straight-to-Redbox-after-a-two-week-theatrical-run-in-January. Hill feels a LITTLE more back here than in Madso's War, naturally, but this carries a similar feeling of being lost in the sauce, worn down by running out of money and ideas.

There's some grimy fun to be had, though: Hill finally gets to work with Stallone, thus completing a run of complicating some of the '80s most quintessential action stars (Arnie in Red Heat, Bruce in Last Man Standing). Sadly there's not much meat on the bones, as Sly tries to affect a mismatched 48 Hrs. buddy dynamic with a deeply earnest Sung Kang; problem is, Asian jokes sound worse coming out of his mouth than Black jokes did coming out of Nolte's, and Kang can't punch back the same way Eddie could. The score sounds like a dive bar jam band warming up for 90 minutes (derogatory).

Still, I got to root for my boy Jason Momoa, fresh-faced and full of vinegar in this fallow period between Stargate Atlantis, his first failed run as a movie star in the Conan reboot, and fame finally sticking to him in Game of Thrones. There are axe fights and nearly nude punchups between burly men in a bathhouse (like Red Heat!). It's the kind of movie where Christian Slater is SIXTH BILLED and shows up in a tuxedo and wolf mask at a dime store Eyes Wide Shut sex party. The film's port of call is New Orleans, but there are no bad lieutenants. Only bad one-liners.

"I'm a fag. I'm really fucking gay."

Charming little queerdo indie about a pair of mall Goths going on a cross-country road trip, discovering themselves in the process, yadda yadda. Brilliant pair of central performances, and boy is it great to see Karen Black purr across the screen as an aging karaoke star who has long since accepted the obscurity life has served her. Feels tailor-made for regular rotation on IFC in the early 2000s.

A beautifully serene slice-of-life anime that captures that aching feeling of want and yearning -- the desire for the good things in your life to stay calcified forever, the pain of letting someone go for both your sakes, and the way nascent queerness can peel open all the cracks in your existing firmament. Beautiful animation, especially once we lapse into the fairy tale the piece their high school band is playing is based on; the angular, stretched-out character designs of the "real world" give way to a Ghibli-esque lushness, a gorgeous fantasy that always threatens to disappear at a moment's notice.

More I think about this one, the more it makes me cry. I've never seen the show it's based on, but as a former band kid (who, hey, played the euphonium!), I should probably give Shout! Euphonium a shot.

Watched on Thursday June 5, 2025.

Meh-row-bore; there's something of THE OTHERS and THE ORPHANAGE in this (fitting, since the latter's screenwriter directed this), all painterly compositions and '60s Gothic lamenting about the loss of innocence. I just wish the script and pacing caught up to its wounded young ensemble (including George Mackay as yet another live-wire bird boy). A kind of reverse ghost story that turns into more of a psychothriller whose twists feel a bit late-'90s labored.

So wild to see Syril Karn in a non-ANDOR role; boy feels primed to play constipated little weasel boys, and fuck is he good at it.

Final act falls apart by the end, but boy I do love when Sodey plays with the camera -- especially when he chooses to ask, "What if we made Paranormal Activity but the GHOST was the camera?"

You can SMELL the Spike TV all over this -- the Investigation Discovery-level production value, the frenetic shakycam, the wooden actors spitting out dime-store dialogue through improv-class Boston accents. I'd say Hill should be ashamed of this, but well this is the SECOND Alan Smitheeing I've seen from him here. Best forget this one, even for Hill diehards.

"We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house, from birth 'til death, we travel between the eternities."

Deeply fitting that, a mere two years after directing the Deadwood pilot, Walter Hill would continue to blaze down the dusty trail of Western television with a lush, patient miniseries in the tradition of Lonesome Dove. So many shades of Hawks here, one of Hill's idols; specifically Red River, with its old-man/young-buck dynamic (though aged up to old codger/middle-aged grunt) and a grand adventure set against a livestock drive across the Old West. Hill's worlds are amoral, and this one's no exception: Duvall's Prent and Church's Tom are just about two of the only good men out here in the Old West, contending with sex slavers, bounty hunters, and smallpox genociders with the cold righteousness that comes from the barrel of a gun. And yet, Hill focuses on the gentleness these men exude, both to each other (albeit reluctantly) and to friends and charges. The five Chinese sex slaves they free early on, and who become their erstwhile companions and charges, make this feel like a more ambling Old West take on Mad Max: Fury Road. In a hard world, these two choose to endure pain and sacrifice to help the most vulnerable among them. And their freed charges do the most dangerous thing of all: Trust two men who can hardly understand them. Their actions are their universal language, and they speak kindness for the first time since the girls' feet hit Western soil.

This was AMC's first ever original content, and it's easy to see why it was so lauded in its day: Lloyd Ahern shoots the wide Western plains with suitable majesty, and Van Dyke Parks and David Mansfield's score twangs with just enough influence from Chinese and Native musical styles to feel respectful and not appropriative. I was reminded of Costner's recent Horizon - An American Saga: A redemptive, revisionist Western, one clear-eyed about the harsh realities of the time but still suffused with a kind of nostalgic romance for the era. You can smell the boot leather and hear the chirp of cicadas, the warmth of the campfire as Heck plays his fiddle and the girls dance.

Supremely me coded.

The play's the thing, wherein we hear
The conscience of the king.

I'm.... pretty sure I loved this? Endearingly stately Canadian queer reverie about the innate theatricality of queerness, the layers of artifice and performance we put on to satisfy ourselves, our loves, and the world around us. Beautifully Brechtian, shades of Jean Genet, stories within stories within prisons. The cage of the closet, the cage of unrequited love, the cage of religious repression, the cage of patriarchy -- the bars we see hold so much more than people.

John Greyson's approach is SO elegant in drifting us between so many realms -- the prison, the stage, the lush full world our inmates pretend to occupy. The use of drag for the female characters is beautifully Shakespearean; Alexander Chapman's French mademoiselle is a triumph.

Weirdly enough made for an interesting accompaniment to Walter Hill's Undisputed, both tales of entire prison populations reorienting themselves around the biblical conflict between two men.

Not getting your ideas for revenge against your queer basher by searching "closeted gay expose" into Pornhub Gay.

There are a pair of staggeringly committed performances here from George Mackay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, which is why it's disappointing to say that Femme fumbles its racial and even queer politics especially in its final fifteen minutes. Its first half is harrowing, and even transgressive, peering into the ways trauma crystallizes us and drives us to obsession, and the ways the ab/abused dynamic can get wobbly. But at the end of the day, Jules feels only ever defined by his trauma, and Preston's tortured closet case gets a bit too much sympathy considering the acts of violence he enacts upon his prey. (That the film is bookended by violence against a Black queer body just feels downright cruel.) The film needed to commit one way or the other to Preston's fate; instead it shrugs its shoulders and says "it's complicated."

"Do we want an R rating or an X?"
*looks at her entourage*
All: XXXXXXXX!!!!

We stan a bipolar fag hag queen (tho major points deducted for the time she chortles at the news that one of her female assistants was potentially SA'ed the night prior)

Still a staggering music doc, hitting somewhere between BTS portrait of an artist at the height of her fame and a vibrant, vivid concert film that includes some of the sluttiest, poppiest, greatest pop tunes of the '80s. Feels like lightning in a bottle -- that you're experiencing what it's like to be Madonna, to be around Madonna, to be loved (and rejected) by her.

The notion of combining the boxing and prison movies is just such an innately genius one -- what if Rocky was also The Shawshank Redemption? -- and Walter Hill and David Giler actualize it with such raw, if imperfect, conviction. What differs from those tales, though, is Hill's jagged edges, setting up a mano-a-mano match between Snipes as a zen lifer who makes clipper ships out of matchsticks and Rhames as an unrepentant egotist who'd be the unsympathetic heavy in most other movies but here he's the person we spent the most time with. This one intersects most with some of Hill's lesser-discussed works -- the boxing-based masculine codes of Hard Times, and the street codes and peers through the bars into Blackness of Tres.

I love the way character actors float through this thing like butterflies, words stinging like bees. (Michael Rooker as a prison guard, Fisher Stevens as Snipes' trainer-cum-hype-man, Dayton Callie as Ving's paternal manager.) Gone are Hill's wide-open spaces, replaced by the gray walls and bars of a maximum-security prison (shades of Supernova's spaceship, with all its fog?); his flashes of black and white reverie feel like impact points for past tragedies and present punches, a nifty replacement for the Peckinpah-ian slow motion he's leaned on so long.

It also features Peter Falk pronouncing it "cham-peen" and Master P singing the Star-Spangled Banner to a hip-hop backbeat, so, you know. Cinema.

It’s hard to underestimate just how much of a pleasant surprise Dan Trachtenberg‘s “Prey” was when it came out in the heady days of 2022. An action-thriller good enough for theatrical release, yet shunted to streaming on Hulu, it found a novel spin on the classic Predator formula by putting the titular beastie in a novel historical setting, pitting the alien big game hunter against a different era of human combatant (there, a Comanche warrior) and seeing who wins. The question one has after seeing that is, where else could they go? While Trachtenberg has another live-action spin on the franchise coming later this year (“Predator: Badlands,” in which ol’ Preddy is the protagonist), he and co-director Joshua Wassung have gifted us with an animated anthology film to tide us over until then. And fittingly, this one feels made for streaming.

“Predator: Killer of Killers” dips its toes into the central conceptual appeal of “Prey,” in a triptych of stories that see three different humans from three different eras facing off against the Yautja. Each comes with their own chapter title—”The Shield” follows Viking raider Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) on a quest for revenge against a tyrant who killed her husband, “The Sword” tracks a ninja (Louis Ozawa, who fittingly played a yakuza in Nimrod Antal’s “Predators”) battling his samurai brother for succession, and “The Bullet” sees a plucky young WWII pilot (Rick Gonzalez) testing his mettle in the skies above the Pacific. Each, of course, finds their quests for revenge or acknowledgement complicated by the sudden arrival of the Predator on their battlefield.

Full review at RogerEbert.com

A modest step down from the first two, but you're gonna get that with any non-Paul King Paddington. Still charms, though, even through all the Temple Run shenanigans of the finale. Olivia Colman is a delight.

Plus, Antonio Banderas in Amelia Earhart drag!

Everyone here is too boring to be pretending to have this much fun. As Peter Griffin once said, "It insists upon itself."

James Vanderbilt delivers some Threat Level Midnight-ass dialogue, delivered by an absolutely sauceless Krasinski, giving us Toxic Positivity Indiana Jones. Pure algorithmic cinema, in classic Apple fashion.

Chris Benstead's score and the production design innocent.

The sight of Harrison Ford, beleaguered, exhausted, on a Peloton, is maybe one of the only times this thing entertained me. Funny how both Phase Five Marvel projects spend SO much time with Congressional hearings and White House business, yet have no discernible political positions of their own.

"Tell me that ain't the greatest show on Earth."

Grimy, effective serial killer thriller with Jai Courtney gurning and glaring with all the possessive energy of Jon Hamm's Reverend in Kimmy Schmidt (complimentary). It doesn't really chart new waters, but sinks its teeth into some fun sequences. Insert additional shark wordplay.

A well intentioned glance into the nature of learning, but it ends up really just raising questions without bothering to dig very deeply into them. An essay film about learning that refuses to teach (with a few too many "just asking questions" bits about AI for comfort).

A notoriously expensive boondoggle, the true outlier in my Walter Hill journey (considering he came in mid-production to replace William Malone, had his own clash with the studio, quit to be replaced by Jack Sholder, who stripped out a lot of Hill's stuff; Francis Ford Coppola would later go in and do ANOTHER editing , mostly just adding in a zero-G sex scene where he digitally darkened Robin Tunney's skin in footage so they could make it Angela Bassett's character).

None of Hill's aesthetic or thematic signposts are here, and the thing is an absolute mess: Full of charming-in-their-tackiness early 2000s CG and production design, a ship of horny sexy adults so randy you wonder how they got cleared for extensive space travel, and more harsh blue color grading than you can shake a Battlefield Earth at. Every shot is in such discomfiting closeup I could barely tell what was going on; perhaps they knew, if they pulled out wide enough, we'd see that the sets look like Jason X on half the budget (and a quarter of the charm).

God, I wish the sight of James Spader at his most shredded and seductive (the pear brandy scene!), or the zero-g lovemaking, or Angela Bassett quietly commanding the entire picture on her shoulders, made this feel like anything less than an incoherent piece of gibberish. It takes itself too seriously to swing as hard as it needs to be campy.

On the bright side? The MacGuffin is an alien pocket pussy from the ninth dimension. But it comes complete with a dull-as-dishwater Peter Facinelli in the bargain, so maybe I'll leave Fleshlight Gordon at home.

A messy, messy gay potion that's mostly an excuse to vibe out with Stockard Channing, Dianne Wiest, some New England Better Homes & Gardens realness, and a bevy of haughty dames in killer hairdos getting drunk on margaritas and sisterhood. If this is womanhood, I want in.

You know, in an age where so many Hollywood blockbusters, especially legacyquels, are bloated two-and-a-half-hour messes that stay long past their welcome, I'm almost refreshed by a brisk 90-minute lark that could absolutely stand to be longer and flesh out its world and plot. As is, it feels like four movies smushed into one, and flies past you so frenetically it hardly leaves an impression.

Its first half is an inventive little age-swapped twist on the original Karate Kid, where the kid himself (Ben Wang, who absolutely steps up to the mat; he's got incredible charisma to match those moves) trains an over-the-hill boxer (Jeremy Jackson, clearly building off his Doctor Odyssey hotness) who wants to save his Noo Yawk pizza t. But that movie ends as quickly as it began, with stakes as suddenly imposed as they are nebulous, and then it hurls in Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio to square off as sparring mentors to our young protagonist to prep for a karate tournament as hastily introduced as it is breezed through. I'd love to live in each of these movies, especially when the cast seems so game; too bad the entire thing rushes through each beat so quickly the whole film feels like one big training montage. (The Spider-Verse-esque bursts of animation running through the thing don't do much to dispel that feeling.)

The fights are well-staged but uncertainly shot, and chopped up in the edit to within an inch of their life; a real shame, considering Wang absolutely has the flexibility and expressiveness Chan exhibited in his youth (not to mention Chan, even in his seventies, has some semblance of "it" still). Would have loved to have seen a bit more of the inventive fights, and Wang's agility.

Also, it's absolutely a Pepsi ad masquerading as a motion picture -- the most unrealistic thing about this whole enterprise was seeing a gen-alpha kid voluntarily drinking a Starry.

Vibes are off as soon as I hear "Say What You Need to Say" playing over the opening credits.

Best part of this is the scene when Jackie Chan beats up on several little Chinese children.

"You think the meek are gonna inherit the Earth? If they are, you won't be around to see it."

Nasty, gnarly Prohibition-era gunslinging Western with slices of Woo and Leone wedged deep in between. It's a film as dirty and dusty as the FILTHY baritone sax that kicks off Ry Cooder's incredible score, as Hill pilots a stoic Bruce Willis through a Yojimbo-styled turf war between warring gangs in a podunk town in the middle of nowhere. The gunshots are as deafening as ever, and ever more voluminous since Willis flings himself (and others) from one end of town to the other with twin .45s and the infinite ammo cheat. Walken's also here, grumbling and growling with Nolte-esque gravel, flinging untold numbers of bullets into entire buildings with his Tommy gun.

It's low-dorn and dirty and amoral, all furrowed brows and masculine posturing. "I was born without a conscience." But isn't that Hill in a nutshell, or rather, shell casing? Just throw a pile of craven opportunists in a town with few resources, give them a moll or two to fight over, and let the carnage commence.

"Do yourself a favor. First thing: Get a firearm."

I'll say it: This is the best thing Joss Whedon has ever done.

This is not coming from a Whedon fanboy: I've barely watched any Buffy, or Dollhouse, and I think his Avengers entries are the most slapdash and utilitarian pictures the pre-Endgame MCU has to offer. I think his quip-heavy pattern of screenwriting has inspired a scourge of horrible imitators, and obviously, per reports, the man's a creep and a menace.

And yet. Firefly's my jam, and Serenity feels like the most refined, entertaining, well-structured version of that story. A tight, taut, two-hour space opera with plenty of Western cheek without making it feel like the often twee pastiche of the TV show, a hail mary from dedicated fans who found the show at the height of the DVD box set era and yelled loud enough at executives to fool them into thinking there was an audience for a $30 million movie. Serenity is an "It's Morbin' Time" moment, but one that produced something that works.

Whedon got the guy who shot Unforgiven to shoot his space Western, and it shows: amid the stylized-but-effective color grading there are some STAGGERING and elegant compositions here, making its ready-for-TV cast look like movie stars. Fillion shows up to this thing like he knows it's his last chance to have the spotlight like this; it doesn't take, of course, and he lands on his feet in cop procedurals and ing turns in James Gunn movies. But he's got the Harrison Ford juice here, all angular face and arched brow. He holds up to Literal Oscar Winner Chiwetel Ejiofor in both verbal and physical duels, and it's a sight to see.

This is a space opera that's ABOUT something: the war against apathy, the clash of warring ideals, the need to accept ourselves and each other for our stupid human flaws. "I don't care what you believe. Just believe it." Most films of this ilk shoehorn some theme at the end after all the VFX has been pre-vizzed; this feels woven into the bones of the screenplay. (Yeah, the stealth libertarianism of its characters is eugh, but that's Westerns for you, and the Miranda plot turns a little RFK in 2025 -- the fluoride in the water will sap your mojo! -- but these are minor niggles I'm willing to forgive.)

Sure, any movie based on an ensemble TV show will be about "family" to some extent, but Whedon economically builds the Serenity crew here to the point where you care as deeply about them as he does, even if you didn't see the series. Everyone gets their moments to shine, especially Summer Glau, who soars mightily against the "Whedon waif" attributes River innately has to combat. They're scrappy underdogs, not the best in the business but they get things done through sheer chutzpah and crazy fucking ideas. The big space battle at the end? They don't shoot a single laser. It's just their little, torn up ship, mooning some crazy space cannibals so they can keep the big evil fleet busy enough to make a run for the endzone.

Everything, from production design to costumes to David Newman's well-balanced score, keeps the Western flair of the show but injects just enough spectacle and cyberpunk to elevate it beyond its TV origins. The more I watch it, the more I think it just might be perfect.

"Every time there is a death of a hero, we are all more the less."

This makes a fascinating followup to GERONIMO, the other half of Walter Hill's mid-90s deconstruction of classic Western heroes; this time, it's Will Bill Hickok, himself trapped in a myth of his own making. It's a film about self-destruction, of the ways one's desire to move through the world giving zero fucks eventually rots away at you, and alienates you to those who also think you a legend.

All the Hill Western signposts are here -- the cacophonous gunfire, the beautifully flailing bodies, the mixture of textured sepia photography with black-and-white segments meant to give us a glimpse into our characters' heads (this time, they're shot on video, which is a fascinatingly contemporary gesture). It's suitably messy, and sometimes the film's origins as a stage play let it down. But there's some really fun touches here, and intriguing performances (even David Arquette's aw-shucks nervousness works well for Jack McCall, the man least likely, yet historically most successful, to kill Wild Bill).

Hill looks back at the myths and legends of the Old West with a jaundiced eye, and in a different way than the acid Westerns of the '70s. He sees a grace and romanticism even in these flawed figures; sure, Bill is an asshole who grumbles his way through life as if he moves through a world he doesn't belong in. But that's the life of a Hill protagonist: You are what you do, whether driver or warrior or cowboy, and you're simply destined to walk down the road that's put in front of you.

"I didn't know murder was a love language."

A thorough charmer! Like the 90s romcom spin on a holiday slasher, and of course Mason Gooding is too handsome for words. A few fun, gnarly kills (slow motion decapitation!) and has its bloodied tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Really hate the feeling of a film numbing me so much with unstylish exposition and flashbacks to its own history that I can't quite enjoy the objectively breathtaking spectacle on display. But I think here, Cruise and McQuarrie fly too close to the sun on their little biplanes, dialing up the self mythologizing to achingly sincere levels (no tongue in cheek "living manifestation of Destiny" monologues) as we see Daddy God Cruise sacrifice himself, Christlike, for his moviegoing disciples.

The submarine sequence and the planes are staggering, of course. I just wish I didn't have to swim through so many war room meetings and a murderer's row of undeserved ing characters to do it. I miss Rebecca Ferguson, I miss Lorne Balfe, I miss when the team had fun. Maybe the most impossible mission of all was landing this franchise in an elegant way.

Catching up with Part One before I trust Ethan one last time, and for a franchise that started as a TV show, it's doubly disappointing to see it circle back around to the flat rhythms of television. This plays out like the first half of a season finale, all setup with little payoff, and the flatness of the cinematography really lets down some of the spectacle.

The things that save it are, frankly, the stunts and Cruise's clear mandate to McQuarrie to pay homage to classic cinema. The General bits on the train, Cruise letting his hair down for the Fiat sequence and throwing some slapstick in, that's all neat. Just a shame about the rest of it.

Really dug this one! Gnarly and mean spirited as all the best entries in this franchise are, but the generational trauma bent in this one lends it an interesting familial dynamic (even as I wonder how it would feel if the extended fam were a bit more fleshed out). Some sly ing turns and of course, nasty slow-burn Rube Goldberg kills - the MRI/vending machine combo!

Tony Todd was such a trooper to come back and stare death in the face while he was literally doing that in real life. And the 60s prologue makes me want the tranchise to pull a Predator and envision new stories in other time periods. Flappers in the Roaring Twenties at a speakeasy! The Renaissance! The Old West! Hell, put Final Destination in Space!

Theatrical Experience Note: Had a drunk guy with a cane visibly and proudly brandishing and chugging a whole bottle of tequila during the runtime, and yelling at the screen. At one point, his baseball cap fell behind him, and he spent a cool five minutes drunkenly searching everywhere but the place it was. Tio Tequila ended up sleeping through the credits, Crocs propped up on the seat in front of him. Legend.

"I lie a lot. Helps me control the world."

Anthony Harvey's adaptation of Le Roi Jones' play is a staggeringly theatrical parable about the predation of white women on Black men -- first as fetishism, then as threat. Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. are incredible together, the former a wild, Eve-like siren, curling and twisting her way around Freeman's buttoned-up Black man amid the tightly controlled space of the subway car. Of course, the first half is her climbing all over him, gurning and gnashing her teeth as if in heat, poking and prodding him. Then, of course, his defenses come down, and he snaps in a powerful monologue that reveals the thin veil that often undergirds a lot of respectability politics -- the suit and tie isn't for them, it's for US, to make us just leave them alone. But that's not enough for white supremacy; it's got to dig its heels into the skin of Black flesh and tear away all its defenses, then kill the body for standing up for itself.

A tight, taut hour of civil rights-era social anxiety more powerful than any milquetoast "can't we all just get along" contemporaries.

John Barry's clinking, paranoid score helps, too.

There's a *baseline* competence here that I didn't mind, especially for this particular genre of Disney live-action remakes. The Marcel the Shell guy clearly has an eye for blending CG critters in photorealistic environments and letting them play as though they're real little guys, and that works wonderfully for Stitch. Maia Kealoha is also cute as the live-action Lilo, and I'll give Billy Magnussen a couple of points for some fun alien-in-a-human-body physical comedy.

But woof this script, and the way it's shot, and the rejumbling of characters into flat background players, and the way the pace rushes along for fear that your endlessly-distracted tot will miss ANYTHING if it puts its foot on the brake for a second.... it all adds up to a whole lot of mess.

More than that, I've just got an issue with these Disney live-action remakes, especially when they don't take radically different approaches to the material. Barring that, it just feels like remaking them for the audiences who inherently think of animated works as "lesser," and that the goal of cinema should be an endless quest for verisimilitude. The goal isn't to use Stitch to tell an interesting new story; it's to keep trying the same stories over and over again until they look REALISTIC enough.

The biggest downgrade in retelling this movie in 2025 is that Lilo, by default, must be turned into an iPad kid.

“This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little, and broken, but still good.”

Having seen this for the first time YEARS after How to Train Your Dragon, I absolutely see Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois' deal now. Also, it's frankly criminal that an animated film can be so effortless, so working class, so culturally specific, AND nail the schmaltz and humor all at the same time.

"The first, and most notable, downgrade comes from following Janiak with “Calibre” director Matt Palmer, who doesn’t seem to have quite the same command of suspense, blocking, and direction of actors as his predecessor. Where the other “Fear Streets” managed to find some balance between building a cast/story and merely aping the periods they’re set in (and, in so doing, the horror films that inspired them), “Prom Queen” leans hard on the ’80s nostalgia button. Costumes are so garish, the needle drops so incessant (right down to an awkward dance off set to “Gloria” that’s perhaps a callback to the extended disco sequence in “Prom Night”), that the whole thing feels less like reinvention and more like emulation. Less attention is paid to characterization, despite weaving a convoluted mythology around Lori and the feuding families of the town. Visually, there’s both too much effort to emulate the grainy look of these ’80s slashers and not enough, mainly amounting to modern digital photography with some filters thrown in.

Granted, there are a few novel thrills peppered among the paper-thin characters; when Palmer sees fit to drop the limp writing and just skitter one or two teens away in a corner to canoodle, our killer has some suitably gnarly surprises for them. One early kill involving a paper cutter gets two thumbs up (that is, if one still has hands to raise them), and a buzzsaw to a face gets particularly juicy. This is the kind of horror flick where anything vaguely pointy can impale you if you land on it the wrong way, or falling backwards into any old circuit breaker will shoot deadly lightning through your body. In those intermittent moments, “Prom Queen” delivers, though sadly nothing will top the bread-machine kill from “Part I.”"

Full review at RogerEbert.com

A barebones, well-intentioned, but deeply naive and ill-timed doc about the links between white supremacy and Republican ideology, especially in the Trump era. Sure, little of this is WRONG, but it’s very Right Wing Culture War 101, nothing that the kind of audience this doc will attract doesn’t already know. As is, it feels like a concentrated 85 minutes of MSNBC-level scaremongering about the dark road we’re going down, with little contextualization from the left. When Hillary Clinton is the left-most figure you can really wrangle, the whole thing feels a bit too little, too late.

This kind of doc could have been more effective during Biden’s , not five months into an that’s already tripled down on the white grievance politics in ways even Goldberg couldn’t seem to anticipate.

Simply put, if you already know who Roger Ailes is, and can sniff out a racist dog whistle from 30 paces, you’ll get nothing out of this besides agita.

Every Hill film is a Western, so it's fascinating when he does get to do some actual Westerns -- great use of Studi, his stony face and reedy voice holding in intense complications and contradictions about Geronimo's role in assisting the US Cavalry in the forced relocation of the Apache. Same goes for Hackman and Duvall, already old gunhands at this kind of grisly '90s Western. Even Baby Matt Damon is here as our babyfaced narrator!

But it's the broad strokes and minimalist-in-the-wrong-way dialogue of the John Milius script, and frankly Jason Patric's movie-star good looks and wooden dandyisms, that let down the sepia-toned photography and lush landscapes of this one. It's a bit more highbrow than Hill's usual nastiness; it feels a bit like a Touchstone Picture, the kind of post-Dances With Wolves Western you could throw on during a couple of slow periods in high school history class. Still, Hill's perspective feels firmly entrenched in the slow tragedy of settler colonialism, and the perceptions of brutality the colonized must weather in order to defend their homes and ways of life.

Hill in the '90s feels like a man out of time, even more than usual: even so, his sprucing up of an old '70s Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis script is excitingly contemporary, even as (as he protests) he didn't have race in mind when he constructed his greed-vs-gangster riff on Treasure of the Sierra Madre. One of those films that feels informed, rather than compromised, by the fact that the LA Riots happened just a short while before release (the film was previously titled "The Looters" before those events, well, soured that term). It's a story of rural whites encroaching on urban Black spaces, all filtered through the locked-room confines of a single-space thriller.

I also ove the camcorder gag, a new way to spice up Hill's preoccupation with frenetic, well-staged action. It also lends added live to the performances of Ices both T and Cube -- the former so commanding in his delightfully fly suit-mullet combo, the latter bursting with all that post-Boyz N the Hood energy. The white leads are a bit less layered, with Sadler the wild-eyed Bogary to Paxton's soft-bellied Walter Huston. Still, can't argue with a bunch of people falling from Atlanta sawmills to the sound of Ry Cooder's shredding guitars, and dudes running around on fire in the opening minutes.

Strangely sticks the landing, mostly by not overstaying its period-flashback welcome and delivering some obvious, but compelling enough payoffs to all its mythologizing. The "Riverdale VVitch" first half is neat enough, taking a Back to the Future Part III tack by letting its previous cast play around in funny clothes and accents with different parts. Then we cut back to the 1994 framework for a mall-centered climax that feels like a stronger Stranger Things finale, with a few inventive spins on the typical ways to dispatch of supernatural slashers.

Also, we love a horror series that just says WE LOVE LESBIANS AND RIOT GRRL MUSIC, and that's enough to build up a lil esteem in my eyes.

The mythology of this long-form trilogy is the weakest bit about it, even as it's the thing that sets these films apart from their naked influences. The '70s summer camp vibe is all right, and Sadie Sink carries her bit well enough, but the thing drags so very much and the ing cast is hardly that interesting. I kept hoping we'd cut back to Gillian Jacobs and the more interesting teens from the 1994 segments.

My experience with Tarr is limited, so I still had to get used to his patient, droll rhythms: tableaus of devastation and philosophical malaise revealed in slow, steady movements, pulling back from the micro to eventually show us the macro of a world in spiritual and emotional crisis. How lovely, then, to see those moments of levity within the Titanik Bar, where the denizens of this unknown place still dance and make merry, like a slightly more downbeat take on the club scene from Playtime.

Also, love me a morose protagonist who laments that "all stories are stories of disintegration," only to have a character late in the film basically tell him to lighten the fuck up. Even in Tarr's bleakness, there's a grim sense of humor.

Despite being more of "An Eddie Murphy Production" this time around (he's above Nolte in billing finally), Another 48 Hrs. feels a bit more Walter Hilly than the previous one! Biker gangs treated like roving cowboy bandits -- one's even named William Hickok! -- and rivulets of blood spurting out of bodies that fling back thirty feet through plate-glass windows, and dudes thrown out of buildings to land on trucks filled with glass water jugs. (We even see a reprise of Nolte holding up one of those pens that exposes a naked lady when you turn it over, which he also did in Extreme Prejudice.)

Yeah, it's more of the same, and it's kinda boring, but at least it has one of the most quintessential Walter Hill images of his career: A motorcycle bursting through a movie screen featuring big, thrusting, undulating tits. CINEMA.

I still doing the JVCD "We can all go home" speech for the cattle-call one-act auditions at my small liberal arts college one semester for the directing students.

Of COURSE I got the part, are you kidding me?

"How would you like a new face?"

Curious preface to The Assignment, interestingly enough: Hill forcing a character through a massive physical transformation (funny how pre-op Mickey Rourke looks like Mickey Rourke NOW, or Blanka from the live-action Street Fighter movie) to see whether that changes their essential nature. Here, it plays out as a nasty, grimy but nonetheless patient neo-noir revenge picture, as Rourke smolders his way out of hospital to ingratiate himself with the goons who killed his mentor (Lance Henriksen, in his slutty leather jacket or sleeveless cowboy shirt like he's still in Near Dark; Ellen Barkin, an S&M firebrand nightmare that I instantly fell in love with).

Still, the premise intrigues more than the execution, especially as its middle stretch dragggggs hard. You'd think Hill and New Orleans would go together like Mardi Gras beads and exposed tits, but there's something about the accents that stymies Hill's writing and the cast's performances. (Especially Elizabeth McGovern, who does her level best with her Cajun drawl.)

Is this the only time Forest Whitaker and Morgan Freeman (playing a pre-SE7EN gumshoe) have shared screentime? I refuse to look it up and let the legend rest here. Both lovely.