They were all young once: Don Corleone and Darth Vader, Butch and Sundance, Hannibal and Leatherface, Maleficent and Cruella. And long before he was the world’s best-known chocolatier and distributor of life-changing golden tickets, William “Willy” Wonka was just a twentysomething kid with a top hat, a sweet tooth, and …
Read More »
Holocaust movies are now a genre. It makes one more than a little queasy to acknowledge this. We’re talking about art that seeks to recreate an atrocity of such devastating scale and magnitude; to imagine the unimaginable. You can say the phrase “Holocaust movie” and a number of images and …
Read More »
When I was a kid growing up in the Berkeley flatlands, I used to play with a couple of neighbor kids, Tony and his little brother, Mikey. One day in 1979, two men got out of a car, approached Tony and Mikey’s house, and beat another man with a club. …
Read More »
It starts not with a bang, but a lack of Wi-Fi. The internet goes down, which means no social media, no email, no communications with the outside world, and — because this is a Netflix movie about worst-case scenarios — no streaming. Then satellites are knocked out, which kills any …
Read More »
“I ought to be thy Adam,” says the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “But I am rather a fallen angel.” It’s the basis for every mad scientist story: You try to create man and end up with a monster. Fuck around with playing God and see what happens. Poor Things …
Read More »
A monster can be a green, scaly lizard that towers over buildings. Or a bloodsucking fiend in a black cape. Or an equivocating, self-pitying old man who refuses to own up to the lives he has destroyed and hides behind the blinkered assurance that God will forgive him for his …
Read More »
Beyoncé’s Renaissance is so much more than a concert film. It’s a superhero epic—as if Bey is filling the void left by The Marvels or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It’s a glorious three-hour tour of the Queen in all her creative splendor, on her record-setting Renaissance World Tour from …
Read More »
The tale begins with a crime that left everyone baffled. In July 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children (and one driver) was hijacked in the sleepy Central California town of Chowchilla. The kidnap victims were taken to two vans, driven to an abandoned rock quarry, led off the bus, …
Read More »
You would not call Eileen Dunlop “innocent.” A twentysomething with a little college under her belt — even if she’d hadn’t dropped out when her mom died, she still would have become a secretary, what with this being the early 1960s and all — Eileen has her hands full taking …
Read More »
When Amy Carlson’s mummified body was found in April 2021, it looked like a blue skeleton. It was also in a sleeping bag wrapped in Christmas lights. Her followers in the Love Has Won cult were apparently still waiting for the Galactics, a group of dead luminaries led by Robin …
Read More »