Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A man goes to make a movie about a shark. He decides to shoot on the ocean instead of a tank on a soundstage, to give it that extra sense of realism. Virtually everything that can go wrong does go wrong, including …
Read More »Why 'Winter Kills' Is the Perfect Conspiracy Thriller for the QAnon Era
The ’70s were the perfect time to be paranoid: rumors of government-sanctioned assassinations here and abroad, second-gunman theories around dead presidents, whispers of elite secret societies pulling strings, that whole Watergate thing. It wafted in the air like yesterday’s tear gas. The movies picked up the vibe and amplified it. …
Read More »'The Last Voyage of the Demeter' Is a Vampire 'Master and Commander'
OK, class, get out your copies of Dracula and open them to Chapter Seven. Now, skim past the newspaper clipping from the Dailygraph that Mina Murray has pasted into her journal, the one about the storm off the coast of Whitby, and go directly to the part listed as “Log …
Read More »'Medusa Deluxe': A24's One-Shot Murder Mystery With Great Hair
There’s been a scalping at a Northern England hairdressing competition. It’s all any of the hairdressers — “hair artists” might be a better description, given the towering Marie Antoinette-level coifs and rainbow-colored cascades and expertly sculpted geometric ‘dos they’ve designed — can talk about. The victim is Mosca, the presumed …
Read More »William Friedkin Did So Much More Than Invent the Horror Blockbuster
It’s not a movie chase scene so much as the movie chase scene: a breakneck race against time between a criminal on an elevated subway and a cop in a commandeered car, careening through the streets of Brooklyn at ridiculous speeds. The bad guy works for a European drug cartel, …
Read More »'Passages' Is So Sexy and Raw It Got Slapped With an NC-17 Rating
You can find hundreds of egotistical monsters who’ve graced movie screens (don’t get us started on the ones working behind the scenes; that’s a whole other piece), but few of them can compare to Tomas Freiburg. A renowned filmmaker who’s a tyrant on set — his volatile Rainer Werner Fassbinder …
Read More »'Shortcomings' Could Be This Generation's 'High Fidelity'
Randall Park‘s Shortcomings opens with a fake-out: A Chinese-American woman in an evening gown gets insulted by a casually racist white hotel clerk. She turns on her heels, walks over to her dapper-looking husband, exchanges a few words, and walks back to the front desk. They’ve just bought the hotel, …
Read More »Pee-wee Herman Was the Greatest Pop-Culture Manchild Ever
It was the laugh that got you first: A staccato giggle combined with what sounded like a T. rex’s roar. If you watch The Pee-wee Herman Show, the HBO special taken from Paul Reubens’ 1981 stage show that — along with a handful of appearances on Late Night with David …
Read More »'Talk to Me' Is a Thrillingly Weird Horror-Movie Debut From A24
Teenagers — you can’t reason with them, you can’t get them off their phones, and you definitely can’t convince them that fucking around with a cursed mummified hand that allows them to speak to the dead is a bad idea, amirite? Talk to Me, the directorial debut from Australian twin …
Read More »'Final Cut' Is a French Zombie Comedy for Would-Be Tarantinos
Pop quiz: You’re a filmmaker. You’re making a zombie movie. The crew is … let’s be charitable and say “adequate.” The budget is somewhere in the high three-figure range at best. Your main actor is a pompous diva. Even worse, your lead actress isn’t giving you the amount of bone-chilling …
Read More »