The Deadlights Theater: The Wailing
Today's screenings of THE WAILING are 1pm and 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater! See you at the movies!
2022-10-16 14:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
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In the Flesh: Halloween (2007)
I hope you don’t like looking at anything for longer than three seconds, because that’s about as long as Rob Zombie can go before cutting. Halloween is a collage of frantic images each more amateurish than the last, devoid of any framing more sophisticated than centering a figure and often unable to maintain basic spatial continuity. Combine this with Zombie’s adoration of fake-outs and of retreading earlier scenes virtually beat for beat and a script which might be charitably ...
2022-10-15 21:28:16 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Andor S1E04: Aldhani
The props on Andor are a real cut above your standard phoned-in miniseries. The datapads and personal effects its characters use carry a sense of weight and long, hard wear, like graphing calculators used in math class after math class across the decades. That same sense of wear and tear seems to follow the poised and elegant Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), Imperial senator and secret member of the fledgling Rebel Alliance, wherever she goes. O’Reilly imbues the resolved but visib...
2022-10-15 10:39:30 +0000 UTC View PostThe Deadlights Theater: The Medium
Tonight's showing of THE MEDIUM begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!
2022-10-12 21:16:29 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E08: The Lord of the Tides
It’s interesting to note how much of ‘Driftmark’, House of the Dragon’s eighth episode, revolves around the twin axes of mistaken identity and willful self-deception. From the destruction of the fragile rapprochement between Rhaenyra and Alicent by Viserys’s poppy-addled deathbed ramblings to the matter of Jace and Luc’s bastardy coming to, ahem, a head during the hearings to determine the next Lord of the Tides, truth and lies are two edges to the same lethal blade. The ...
2022-10-10 10:03:57 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Hellraiser (2022)
“Mr. Voight never does anything he can get someone else to do for him,” says Serena Menaker (Hiam Abbas), chief counsel and procurer for reclusive billionaire Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić). Of the thematic threads David Bruckner’s Hellraiser pursues, which range from addiction to living with grief, it’s this simple thesis on the nature of the rich that cuts deepest. They eat, and someone else picks up the check. Višnjić has a delightful face, full of mischief and characte...
2022-10-07 17:43:17 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E07: Driftmark
Like many of the best episodes of The Sopranos, ‘Driftmark’ consists mostly of an extended family sitting around arguing. Moving the entire cast to the titular seat of House Velaryon for the occasion of Laena’s funeral gives it a tightness and coherence lacking from last week’s installment, and with Miguel Sapochnik behind the camera the whole thing looks exquisitely Gothic, balancing iconic imagery from both horror and high fantasy to frame the grand occasion. Before the eul...
2022-10-03 03:25:05 +0000 UTC View PostThe Innkeeper's Daughter: Rape and Sexual Violence in Game of Thrones
To say that Game of Thrones catches a lot of flak for its treatment of rape would be an historic understatement. Every year, fans and critics produce countless thinkpieces, tweets, and blog posts detailing the manifold ways in which HBO’s fantasy juggernaut degrades and objectifies women with its depictions of sexual violence. The show’s investigation of rape’s ugliness is routinely classified as a prurient preoccupation, sometimes of the show as a work of art and sometimes of ...
2022-10-01 16:31:42 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Blonde
A white dress flutters in the updraft of a subway vent. A white dress hangs still in the silence. A naked woman, expressionless, backlit by guttering flames, shuts her door against her child. The dress comes down. A hint of labia glimpsed pressed against white cotton. Lovers melt and swirl together into the ephemeral thing that is the beloved, bodies ebbing across the lens in striated waves of skin and keratin, teeth and tongue. This is the world as Norma Jean Baker (Ana de Armas) sees it, a ...
2022-09-28 20:59:14 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Andor S1E03: Reckoning
Yes, the first three episodes of Andor should have been edited together into a single longer episode, and yes, it would still have been a little soggy through the first third, but boy, I guess it’s got some legs under it after all. ‘Reckoning’, the series’ third installment, brings the sci-fi rubber of bureaucrat-cum-policemen and intergalactic smugglers into unforgiving contact with the pavement of reality, and the result is something like a comedy of errors that escalates p...
2022-09-27 06:51:09 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Andor S1E02: That Would Be Me
I like the anvil-striker guy (Neil Bell), enigmatically referred to in the credits as the “time grappler”, who hammers out the hour on Ferrix. Watching him get set up for his evening routine with no preamble or exposition is the kind of small pleasure that makes a fictional world feel real. As the reverberations of each mallet stroke fade into the cool of dusk, Ferrix prepares for the end of the workday, scrappers and merchants and all manner of sci-fi laborers trudging home or to bars an...
2022-09-27 06:17:06 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E06: The Princess and the Queen
‘The Princess and the Queen’ takes us over a decade into the future, straight into the teeth of a storm of recast roles and character deaths that can at times feel overwhelming. By the time the dust settles and Laena Velaryon (Nanna Blondell) and father and son Lyonel (Gavin Spokes) and Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr) have been consigned to the flames, it feels like we’ve been through a second major shakeup without time to adjust to the first. Still, for all that it might have benefited from ...
2022-09-26 04:04:44 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Andor S1E01: Kassa
Andor isn’t afraid to start slow and without context, a decision that won’t really pay off until its subsequent episodes. With its moody lighting, cast of beaten-down nobodies, and lo-fi synth score the show is one part Blade Runner and one part Battlestar Galactica, the story of a man who has played his string out as far as it’s going to go and hasn’t quite realized it yet. The decompressed form Andor’s story takes goes a little far in its inaugu...
2022-09-26 00:21:00 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: The Ink Black Heart
Imagine listening to your racist great aunt describe Twitter to her web-illiterate friends while three different John Grisham audiobooks play simultaneously at randomly rising and falling volumes in adjoining rooms and you have a basic feel for The Ink Black Heart, J. K. Rowling’s latest cinder block-sized entry in her Cormoran Strike series of detective novels. That it opens with thirty pages of characters throwing and attending birthday parties while Rowling makes sure w...
2022-09-19 19:17:50 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Fire and Blood S1E05: 'We Light the Way'
A man’s face beaten to bloody pudding. Friendships in tatters, the king collapsing in a faint, new alliances no sooner struck than bent to the breaking point. It’s a hell of a way to start a marriage. ‘We Light the Way’, the halfway point in House of the Dragon’s first season, starts off peaceably enough, with King Viserys healing the breach between his own house and that of Lord Corlys Velaryon as Corlys’s son Laenor and his betrothed, Rhaenyra, hold a candid oceanside c...
2022-09-19 05:08:11 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Magnificent Warriors
Does David Chung’s Magnificent Warriors suffer from pacing problems? Undoubtedly. It is built on a thick bedrock of Chinese nationalism, making it a kind of sister film to the gung-ho American cop and spy flicks of the 1990s? Yes. For sure. Is it effectively a low-budget Indiana Jones movie crudely welded to the Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence from The Two Towers? Also yes. But lastly and most importantly, does it slap? The answer is a resounding yes. Watching th...
2022-09-18 03:45:48 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E04: 'King of the Narrow Sea'
“What is this place?” asks the princess Rhaenyra as her uncle Daemon leads her deeper into the bowels of a Silk Street brothel. “It’s a place people come,” he says, letting the sentence hang as half a joke for a moment before continuing, “to take what they want.” The chemistry between Smith and Alcock makes the sure to be controversial makeout and foreshortened fuck that follows burn white-hot, and the presence of gay and lesbian lovers in the same space adds a charge that plays...
2022-09-12 02:46:28 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: The Boys
The narcissist who wants to be loved is hardly a novel character concept. Nor is the subversion of Superman, an ubiquitous archetypal figure in modern storytelling, into a tyrannical despot virgin territory for fiction. The authoritarian Communist regime of Kal-El’s alternate self in Mark Millar’s Red Son, the godlike distance and moral alienation of Dr. Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen — this is well-trod territory. The Boys, based on Garth Ennis and Eric...
2022-09-10 03:28:52 +0000 UTC View PostThe Dunk Tank: Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
Take two of the preeminent action stars of the time and surround them with perhaps the least talented crew ever seen, a murderer’s row of hacks, wannabes, and also-rans, and what emerges from the other end of the meat grinder, squeezed out like pork sweepings into a length of intestinal casing, is Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. The film’s cinematographer, Cats and Dogs and Home Alone 3 wunderkind Julio Macat, gives us a vision of British Columbia which manages to ma...
2022-09-06 04:45:58 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E03: 'Second of His Name'
I’ve seen a great deal of ink spilled over House of the Dragon as some sort of girl power parable about men’s resistance to subservience to women, but to dicker over who can and cannot hold the throne, and when, and for what reason, is to miss the central thrust of all George R. R. Martin’s work. The game is the problem, not just the patriarchy entwined with it. No commoner’s ills would be solved by Rhaenrya’s ascension to the throne any more than the hapless knight of Hous...
2022-09-05 05:10:30 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: The Rehearsal Season 1
“But when we were playing daddy and Adam, we were just playing pretend, right?” subject and creator Nathan Fielder asks six-year-old Remy, one of a rotating cast of little boys who had played his son in the titular rehearsal which is the program’s ostensible reason for being. There’s real anxiety in Fielder’s eyes, and he chokes up several times during his repeated attempts to visit with Remy and explain the nature of the fiction they inhabited together. “I don’t want you to be ...
2022-09-03 22:33:22 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: The Rings of Power S1E02: 'Adrift'
If you don’t want your fantasy to be about anything I suppose I can see the appeal of The Rings of Power. A mysterious guy (Daniel Weyman), who I’m assuming will be revealed as Gandalf sooner or later, falls out of the sky in a meteor. The intrepid ‘Harfoot’ (Markella Kavenagh), one of the proto-Hobbits introduced in the premiere, looks after him. The Silvan elf Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) longs chastely for the human healer Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) while her son...
2022-09-02 05:06:43 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: The Rings of Power S1E01: 'Shadows of the Past'
First, an idyll. Elven children frolic in the Zatska-esque meadows of Valinor, the Undying Lands.The distractingly Chadly Finrod (Will Fletcher) relates half a piece of advice to his kid sister Galadriel (Amelie Child Villiers as a young girl, Morfydd Clark as an adult), and then it’s off to the exposition mines to catch a few fleeting glimpses of elves fighting orcs on hideously-lit sound stages, a quick mention of Morgoth, and a look at the shadowy figure of Sauron. There’s nothing much...
2022-09-02 04:35:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe Deadlights Theater: The Irishman
Tonight's screening of THE IRISHMAN begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!
2022-08-31 17:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E02: The Rogue Prince
We open on a sandbar where scores of men are nailed or in the process of being nailed to wooden posts and frames, their bodies swarming with crabs that snip and pick at their waterlogged but still-living flesh. The deformed and leather-masked figure of Craghas “The Crabfeeder” Drahar stalking among them completes the spectacle, giving the whole sun-bathed scene the sweltering, nightmarish feeling of something yanked straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In King’s Landing...
2022-08-29 04:25:09 +0000 UTC View PostThe Deadlights Theater: Goodfellas + Casino
Today's first double feature begins at 1pm EST in the Deadlights Theater. Due to personal circumstances there will be no encore showing. Thank you in advance for understanding.
2022-08-28 14:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: The Medium
Your daughter is locked in her room, the door sealed by sacred symbols painted onto squares of cloth. A shaman tells you not to let her out until he calls to say a ritual is done. It’s a setup as old as storytelling, from Orpheus looking back and dooming Eurydice to eternity in Hades to more recent examples like Red Asphalt and Signal 30, and it’s lost none of its punch. On the one hand is what your senses and impulses tell you, the world as you’ve always known it, and...
2022-08-28 05:26:23 +0000 UTC View PostThe Deadlights Theater: Kundun
Today's screening of KUNDUN begins at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater!
2022-08-24 17:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: House of the Dragon S1E01: The Heirs of the Dragon
And just like that, we’re back. Miguel Sapochnick and Ryan Condal‘s House of the Dragon comes out of the gate swinging, as tight and thrilling as its storied predecessor at its very best. In fact in terms of lighting, costuming, and action choreography it takes a considerable step past Game of Thrones, emerging with a much more fully formed and accomplished aesthetic feel. Its spectacles, too, feel confident and fully realized, whether it’s the dragon Syrax bearing a y...
2022-08-22 03:57:35 +0000 UTC View PostIn the Flesh: Top Gun: Maverick
The world would be a better place if Top Gun: Maverick hadn’t been made. Its relentless fellation of the Navy’s imperialist self-mythologizing viciousness is a stain not just on every man, woman, and child in America but on the art form of cinema itself. It revels in the hellish perversion of mankind’s dream of flight into a tool of mass slaughter, and its slave-owning star makes of himself a perfect poster boy for the kind of directionless, violent young men who crave the stru...
2022-08-21 21:27:16 +0000 UTC View Post