I do love a prologue that perfectly sets up the film it introduces, and one of the nicest ones I’ve seen lately is to be found in Osgood Perkins’ THE MONKEY, based on a short story by Stephen King and turned into an impudent horror film that is scary as hell and twice as funny.… Read More »
WOLF MAN
WOLF MAN starts out promisingly enough establishing a theme of generational trauma and the eeriness of the wild wood while neatly exploring the hunter-becoming-the-hunted idiom. Full points to the excellent cinematography that captures the opalescent otherworldliness of the mist-shrouded Oregon wilderness, and a cast that takes the story seriously, it’s just a shame that said… Read More »
PRESENCE
Steven Soderbergh’s signature style is one of cool detachment to his characters. His films tackle people in crisis, but the tone is always one of an ersatz cinema verité witness to what is happening to them. In PRESENCE, he has channeled that aesthetic into a ghost story told from the spirit’s point of view. Literally.… Read More »
A COMPLETE UNKNOWN
The point is made several times in the course of A COMPLETE UNKNOWN that its subject, Bob Dylan is a complete jerk. In one particularly satisfying moment, Joan Baez tosses him out of her room at the fabled Chelsea Hotel calling him just that after he makes a booty call and then withdraws into the… Read More »
NOSFERATU
David Eggers, who has a vision of such specific originality and clarity that it might well become a horror subgenre at some point, has taken on not just one iconic film in NOSFERATU, but two, both of whose imagery have become part of the cultural landscape even for those who have never seen NOSFERATU (1922)… Read More »
GLADIATOR II
GLADIATOR II has all the spectacle and pageantry (can you say cast of AI thousands?) of its predecessor, and certainly the same amount of gruesome deaths as only Ancient Rome could devise them, but it is a lesser thing story-wise. Not a bad film, but one that comes down firmly on the side of that… Read More »
HERETIC
HERETIC manages to be terrifying because of the very civility each of the characters shows during the slow build-up to the, ahem, crux of the film. This fable for our times is a cleverly disguised dialectic not just on faith, but on the very human need to believe in something in the face of proof,… Read More »
THE APPRENTICE
THE APPRENTICE takes as its focus the relationship between Roy Cohn and the young and hungry Donald Trump of the 1970s. This would be the callow Trump who was stifled by the long shadow cast by his father, Fred (Martin Donovan), and the utter cluelessness about how to play an all too easily rigged system… Read More »
A DIFFERENT MAN
Hell, opined Sartre, is other people, and I am not here to argue with that. I am here to note that filmmaker Aaron Schimberg has made an excellent counterpoint to that idea with A DIFFERENT MAN, an engrossing trip to Hades that is archly, and self-referentially metaphorical as it discovers that Hell is also oneself.… Read More »
MEGALOPOLIS
It feels like the right thing to do when reviewing MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE is to wait for the director’s cut. It’s an impulse as fractured as the film itself considering that Francis Ford Coppola sank his own money into making this film and thereby had final cut. Still, for all the disjointed execution this frustrating… Read More »
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