scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Rachel Getting Married

“All of you people living in this little world of judgement and paranoia and mistrust,” rants Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway) to her family. “I can feel it every second.” It’s a statement made with a staggering lack of self-awareness, but that’s the Buchman clan’s stock in trade, whether it’s Kym’s hair-trigger hostility, her sister Rachel’s (Rosemary DeWitt) exhausted uptightness, or their father Paul’s (Bill Irwin) squishy helicopter parent enabling.These people can’t kn...

Sign of the Dragonfly Chapter VII

It was on their tenth day in the desert that Slava spotted the horseman. The sun was past its zenith and the column was strung out across the shifting sands, their shadows stretching for what seemed like miles. Slava, half-dazed by the heat, turned to follow the progress of a vulture circling in the distance, shading her eyes against the light, and saw a figure on horseback standing in silhouette atop a dune perhaps a mile off. He was head to toe in faded blue, and his mount was slender and s...

Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter VI

The dragonfly rose up from the palace’s windyard in a dizzying rush, the roar of its wings like a hurricane to either side of Rupa where she sat behind her mistress in the howdah. Ahead, past Sima’s other two handmaidens, three Scorpion Guards, her midwife, and her soothsayer, Sahar Soyu, the pilot sat bent low over the great insect’s thorax. Rupa’s stomach churned as the city shrank beneath them, its tapestry of plazas, minarets, temples, parks, and aqueducts. The reservoir to...

In the Flesh: Frankenstein (2025)

It’s nice to be reminded that Oscar Isaac can act. After years of sleepwalking through airless franchise crap, here he is throwing himself into a project he obviously cares deeply about. His incarnation of Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s infamous death-obsessed scientist, is tightly wound and rigorously unselfaware, his face frequently twisted by overt denial, his body language curt and hurried. It’s a good performance. Forceful. Specific. It’s a pity it’s stuck in the middle of...

In the Flesh: Bugonia

Yorgos Lanthimos uses whimsy more effectively than perhaps any other working director. In Bugonia, his latest feature, he keeps that particular knife hidden for a long, long time, but when it finally comes out, he buries it right to the hilt. The disarming sight of the Andromedans in their bulky, braided costumes, which resemble weighted blankets more than clothing, the fanciful 60s Golden Age sci-fi feel of their mothership with its sandy floors and natural angles, even the strange ...

In the Flesh: The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (2025)

It’s such a treat to watch a director grow and mature in real time. The thematic fixations that made director Michelle Garza Cervera’s debut feature, La Huesera, so captivating are expertly complicated and expanded on in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Folding class into the mix of repressed lesbianism and maternal failure not only heightens the tensions of the original 1992 film, it enriches the characters at its center. It doesn’t hurt that Marie Elizabeth Winstead h...

In the Flesh: Hollow Knight: Silksong

The first thing anyone’s going to think about Silksong is that it’s hard. Gruelingly hard. Punishingly, brutally, relentlessly hard. Rush or fuck up your timing against even the simplest enemies and the game won’t just rap your knuckles, it’ll break your fingers. Taking a boss on the first try happened to me only twice during my hundred-hour playthrough, both times purely due to a stroke of luck. The learning curve begins about where Hollow Knight left off, explained...

In the Flesh: Dead Mail

There’s a moment in Dead Mail I’ve never really seen in anything else. Uptight, sexually repressed Trent Whittington (John Fleck) speaks over a private audio address system to his kidnapping victim, electronic music technician Josh Ivey (Sterling Macer Jr.), pouring his heart out to the other man in a one-sided monologue as Josh lies unresponsive in a sleeping bag on a cold concrete floor. Trent talks about growing up deeply closeted and isolated — the metaphor he uses is being...

In the Flesh: Kindred

I don’t know that I’ve seen a nastier, more brutal ending since The Devil’s Bath. The sight of two well-heeled British aristos cooing over the baby they’ve stolen from a young Black woman, Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), who they kept confined for months is so loathsome it feels like snuff footage. Charlotte herself is gone, swallowed up by a mental health system only too happy to part Black mothers from their babies. This is Rosemary’s Baby if Guy and the Sa...

In the Flesh: Raging Grace

There’s a sick-making tension at the heart of Raging Grace, a cruel, twisting sense of precarity, that any single moment could upend everything undocumented housekeeper and care nurse Joy (Max Eigenmann) is working for. Whether it’s employer Katherine’s (Leanne Best) brittle, reactive micromanagement of Joy or the handful of truly agonizing sequences in which Joy’s daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), risks discovery by leaving her mother’s room, there is no relief from...

In the Flesh: One Battle After Another

As Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, Sean Penn walks like he just got off a horse after a hard day’s ride. He walks like this at all times, as though he’s dismounting a steady stream of horses, one before each scene. He walks like this while held at gunpoint and massively erect. He walks like this with half his face blown off by a shotgun blast. He walks like this as he enters the room he believes to be his long sought-after reward, an office in the Christmas Adventurers Club headquarters, but is i...

In the Flesh: Hades II

Hades II is beautiful. Jen Zee’s much-lauded art direction deserves its roses, imparting a lived-in but rarefied feeling to the game’s mythological settings and characters, as though Alphonse Mucha were going around teaching himself how to utilize chiaroscuro by sketching ruined temples and hidden supernatural wine shops. It’s soothing to look at, deliriously fun and addictive to play, and includes a lot of hot weirdos you can bone off-screen with accompanying dirty sound effec...

In the Flesh: Fantastic Four: First Steps

Every new Marvel movie has its wave of critics declaring it either a return to form or a brand new direction for the lumbering pop culture behemoth, and every new Marvel movie, without fail, is pretty much exactly like its predecessors. Fantastic Four: First Steps has a gloss of retro-futuristic 1960s aesthetics, a likeable core cast, and a tighter focus than most other films extruded by the Feige machine, but at its heart, it’s more of the same. From the muddy, poorly-blocked and ...

In the Flesh: HIM

Director Justin Tipping handles HIM, his feature-length debut, like the unholy love child of a Nike ad and a military recruitment promo reel. Thermal imaged skeletons smash together with concussive force, flesh and viscera quivering within their grayish outlines. We are shoved against Cam Cade’s (Tyriq Withers) sculpted frame and exquisitely beautiful features, watching his muscles move like independent organisms, watching his pale hazel eyes flicker back and forth in panic as he h...

In the Flesh: Foundation Season 3

For two seasons now, Foundation has been the come-from-behind sensation among all its prestige sci-fi and fantasy ilk, an epic series spanning centuries and effortlessly mixing what feels like half a dozen distinct strains of science fiction — everything from philosophy-heavy meditations on human nature and its connection to technology to Jack Kirby’s New Gods-esque spectacle and psychedelia — at any given time. Lee Pace has played the same man, galactic ruler Brother ...

In the Flesh: Night Moves

For the first forty minutes of its sleek 99-minute running time, Night Moves is more or less a standard noir mystery with a curiously rinky-dink score by composer Michael Small. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) is a private eye, a former football star with a chip on his shoulder and a marriage on the rocks, the kind of character you could pull off any airport book rack in the 70s and 80s. Hackman imbues him with life, warmth, and his particular working-class edge, and Melanie Griffith is ...

On Violence

"We must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty... We need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. But I think it's worth it. I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.”

-Charlie Kirk

To say that Kirk was hoisted by his own petard in the most literal sense of...

A Thank You

I try to avoid non-work posts on here, so tomorrow I'll have a review of the classic 1975 neo-noir Night Moves, starring Gene Hackman, and it'll be back to business as usual, but for tonight I just want to take a moment and thank all the new subscribers who've joined today as well as those who have supported my work for years. I have faced intense harassment this year since taking a gig at DC Comics, and now that my run has been canceled things have only intensified. My family member...

In the Flesh: The Naked Gun (2025)

Every single moment of The Naked Gun, and I mean this in the most complimentary sense, is stupid. Every bit is more moronic than the last, a relentless onslaught of idiocy so overwhelming it feels like getting battered by thirty-foot breakers in a storm at sea. Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) saying “no thanks, I have plenty of chairs at home” in response to Frank Drebin Jr’s (Liam Neeson) invitation for her to take a seat, her stone-faced declaration that she writes “true c...

In the Flesh: Daddy's Head

I don’t think anything in Daddy’s Head is poorly done. The performances range from decent (Nathaniel Martello-White as Robert) to unsettlingly raw (the young Rupert Turnbull as Isaac). Director Benjamin Barfoot knows what he’s doing behind the camera, with his disorienting score, and with his spare but deeply unsettling and occasionally moving screenplay. None of it is boring or particularly implausible. It’s a perfectly good horror movie. Better than average, even. Even its ...

In the Flesh: Weapons

There’s a particular rhythm to most good Stephen King stories. The intentional layering of small-town tensions. The probing of everyday human failings and foibles, sometimes in pursuit of true monstrosity, sometimes just because, well, that’s what people are like. Weapons, Zach Cregger’s sophomore feature, may not be a King adaptation, but it bears all the hallmarks of American horror’s grand old man. Weapons is a kind of straightforward fairy tale about a child-eati...

In the Flesh: Sex House

If you want a picture of the future, imagine being forced to deepthroat a dildo somehow synthesized from the physical manifestations of the worst experiences of your life — forever. Written by Sam West, Sam Kemmis, Geoff Haggerty (who also directs), Matt Klinman, Chris Sartinsky, and Michael Pielocik, Sex House is that dildo. It is a tour de force, hilarious both in a skin-crawling, pitch-black satirical sense and on the level of great mimicry. Its peerless comedic timing becomes a...

In the Flesh: Superman (2025)

Right out of the gate, James Gunn’s reimagining of DC’s iconic Superman (David Corenswet) is big and bold, full of bright colors and frenetic action. The villains are repulsive, self-aggrandizing assholes, the heroes are goofy and sincere, there are hover pods and lasers and women made of nanites and hard-charging reporters and superheroes battling dimensional imps drifting through the backgrounds of quiet shots. It’s a living world with more going on than we have time to see, a world w...

In the Flesh: Harvest

With her camera, director Athina Rachel Tsangari makes love to the Scottish countryside with the same pagan verve as her protagonist, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), in the film’s opening sequence. A knothole in a dogwood tree becomes a crotch to tongue and finger. Walter’s dirty fingers mold and shape dark soil mixed with his own urine. He runs his thumb along a blade of grass. Later he will watch the cartographer, Quill (Arinzé Kene), mix insect wings and dried herbs into pigment w...

In the Flesh: The Shield

Imagine if Law and Order had ended with detectives Munch and Finn executing a murder/suicide pact with their families in a fleabag motel. Imagine old-fashioned hound dog Lennie Briscoe joining ICE to save his ass from a laundry list of his own pitch-black misdeeds. One day you’re watching a more or less boilerplate police procedural with the twist that the cops are a mix of characters both crooked and earnest, the next you’re on a Nantucket sleigh ride to Hell. That’s The S...