I suppose there’s an argument to be made for this as a crypto-feminist film, what with its pessimistic (and ultimately even retributive) attitude toward a system that allows rapists to go free and abs to become repeat offenders. That is, until the final scene, which recasts a morally ambiguous statutory rapist as a tentatively heroic character. Bad move, that. This feels like Richard Gardner watched a few rape-revenge thrillers, thought “yeah, but what would the logistics be if she actually…
Half of this movie is the best thing the MCU has ever put out. (To summarize the rest of this review: that half consists of the middle hour and the final 30 minutes, give or take.) The first act is something close to a complete mess, clearly indebted to The Leftovers (the opening sequence is beat-for-beat identical to at least one scene from the show, as is the bit with Cap’s group) while still somehow stretching out the feeling of…
This is a strong 3.5 in the same way that Suspiria is a strong 4.5 for me: no one makes movies quite like Dario Argento, but like Tarantino, like the Coens, something about his personal touch puts me at an ever-so-slight remove from engaging with his work on a deeper level. (I couldn’t tell you what it is any more than I could tell you why I was never able to get into Sonic Youth.) Otherwise, quality stuff. In typical Argento fashion,…
Odd comparison, but it seems to me that this uses sound in the same way Spielberg used CGI in Jurassic Park: Dreyer appears deeply distrustful of the technical innovation of the day, and only deploys it when he’s confident it can capture something unattainable through visuals alone. (Sometimes it’s as simple as letting an audio cue stand in for a visual one, allowing the shot to linger on a character’s reaction to the stimulus instead of necessitating a cut to the…
My most pleasant horror surprise since Just Before Dawn. Christmas Evil (a pun so hilarious that I don’t mind ditching its more fitting original title, You Better Watch Out) is perhaps the first slasher movie I’ve seen where the killer is a. the main character and b. a tragic, sympathetic figure. Lewis Jackson’s method of putting viewers inside Harry’s head is sneakily brilliant, distracting the audience with bluntness (this has one of the least subtle soundtracks I’ve heard in a while)…
I know I’m overrating the hell out of this, but The Nutcracker in 3D is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen and it fills me with glee that THE CO-WRITER OF ANDREI RUBLEV conceived it as a wondrous childhood fantasy. This movie is so fucking weird and deserves to be seen by more people. Notable discovery of this go-around: there are numerous propaganda posters in the Rat Kingdom that say “do the rat thing”, and Rat Hitl…errrr, the Rat King is played by one of the stars of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing! Is it an intentional reference? Who knows!
Hot damn, this really is the best of these, isn’t it? I watched this in the middle of a mini-Cuarónathon, but even displaced from its original franchise context, Azkaban is as perfect an encapsulation of the Harry Potter series’ unique charms as we’re ever going to get on film. This is the first Potter film where the denizens of Hogwarts, students and professors alike, seem to actually like each other. And that’s not to mention the camerawork, which could reasonably be…
I may have told this story on here before, but last summer, one of my younger coworkers reacted with disdain to my professed love of foreign films, saying: “if they aren’t in English, how can you tell if the acting is good?”
That may be the single dumbest thing I have ever heard, and few films reinforce that distinction more than Y Tu Mamá También.
Guess I should be careful what I wish for. Shock Treatment stretches the freeform energy of Rocky Horror’s final third out to feature length, with the end result being a deranged, borderline plotless haze of half-formed ideas. It sort of works. I don’t know if I’ve seen another movie with budgetary limitations this readily apparent, and the disconnect between Shock Treatment’s ambition and its execution is one of the film’s most curious flaws—I love the way Sharman makes the most of…