Of their generation of horror filmmakers, it’s Cronenberg and Carpenter who are known for their practical effects, but with Altered States Ken Russell steps up effortlessly to rival either master. Dr. Edward Jessup’s (William Hurt) arm and torso ripple like jacuzzi water as his genetic memories bubble up within him. A vortex of mist swirls in a closed laboratory, shot through with flashes of pale light, and on the cross hangs a creature with the head of a fanged and many-eyed ram...
2021-05-09 19:49:16 +0000 UTC
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The unspoken punchline of every “Florida Man” joke and public interest story about a gator snatching someone’s miniature poodle is that Florida is a shithole, a federally neglected state hacked up into political incoherence by centuries of gerrymandering and plagued by police violence, inadequate infrastructure, and the property-hoarding, union-busting corporate might of the Walt Disney Corporation. That poverty and pointless, clawing immiseration is everywhere in Amy Seimetz’s Su...
2021-05-07 16:58:22 +0000 UTC
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Early on in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, struggling teenage loner Casey (Anna Cobb) walks out of her house by lantern light, a quiet voyage across the snow-covered lawn to the underworld of her family’s barn. Inside, she contemplates a high-powered rifle before returning it to its case and activating a projector through which she plays an ASMR video by Youtuber Slight Sounds. At first we only hear the creator’s gentle shushing, her litany of comforting whispers tellin...
2021-05-02 18:28:54 +0000 UTC
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“When you're scared all the time,” says mid-level Yakuza gangster Murakawa (Takeshi Kitano) to his much younger girlfriend Miyuki (Aya Kokumai), “you reach a point when you wish you were dead.” Murakawa says it half-jokingly, but the truth of it rings through the entirety of Sonatine. Kitano, who both wrote and directed in addition to playing the lead, sketches a picture of early ‘90s Yakuza life as almost satirically flat and bland, his criminal hideouts dull office buildi...
2021-04-30 22:05:26 +0000 UTC
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“This whole country is built on bones,” family patriarch Zygmunt (Andrzej Grabowski) chuckles nervously, waving a dismissive hand at his new son-in-law Piotr’s (Itay Tiran) insistence that there’s a skeleton buried on the grounds of the family’s pre-war property. While seldom discussed in frank terms by the film’s characters, the devastation of Poland’s Jewish community during and after the second world war forms the backdrop of Demon’s entire story. A well-to-do Poli...
2021-04-28 19:35:30 +0000 UTC
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There’s something uniquely crushing about the final shot in Ingrid Goes West, Matt Spicer’s 2017 black comedy about mentally ill 30-something Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) and her parasocial turned parasitic relationship with Instagram starlet Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen). Awakening from a suicide attempt in the wake of her life’s total collapse, Ingrid finds that a tearful video she posted before taking an overdose of sleeping pills has become an overnight viral sensation. Tens of ...
2021-04-28 13:39:53 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone! While I'm in final edits on my novel, Manhunt, the weekly column and a few In the Flesh reviews (Mortal Kombat, Devil) are going to be delayed for a little bit. No more than a week. Thank you so much for your patience and understanding <3
2021-04-23 17:35:57 +0000 UTC
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There’s so much going on in Sion Sono’s Antiporno, which plunges headlong into subject matter ranging from masculine self-congratulation over their own art about women to the inability of parents and children to understand one another as sexual beings. It’s an intelligent film, self-assured in its structure and pacing — neither of which hold the viewer’s hand — and thematically dense, but as much as it’s about grief, humiliation, trauma, and pornography, it’s also abo...
2021-04-19 15:09:52 +0000 UTC
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Imagine Vertigo, Hitchcock’s classic exploration of the things men read into women, the ways they demand a continuous and ever-changing performance from the women in their lives. Now imagine everyone in it is some kind of weird robot person reciting their lines like a room full of broken speak-n’-spells and the score is entirely synth. That’s Special Effects, more or less. Larry Cohen’s reflexive, purposefully stilted crime thriller is an oddity from top to bottom, a...
2021-04-17 23:40:16 +0000 UTC
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The dad fantasy is well-trod cinematic territory. You’ve got Taken, in which Liam Neeson lives out your shitty uncle’s fantasies of shooting foreigners for menacing his daughter; Breakdown, in which an office drone gets to prove to his wife that he’s actually a sweaty hunk; Diehard, in which John McClane convinces his wife that even though she’s the breadwinner he’s still the Man. On and on it goes until we arrive in 2021 at Ilya Naishuller’s
2021-04-17 02:53:52 +0000 UTC
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You will never in your life want to get out of a structure as much as you’ll want to get out of put-upon college senior-cum-sugar baby Danielle’s (Rachel Sennott) aunt Sheila’s house in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Using anamorphic lenses, Director Emma Seligman and cinematographer Maria Rusche are able to capture broad, deep shots so packed full of bodies, bric-a-brac, and motion that the entire residence feels perpetually seconds away from collapsing and burying the extended Jewish community g...
2021-04-13 22:32:55 +0000 UTC
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There’s a scene early on in Little Marvin and Lena Waithe’s THEM in which Henry Emory (Ashley Thomas) recounts having mustard gas tested on him by his own superiors during his tour of duty in the second World War. Henry’s traumatic memories are triggered by, of all things, a piece of peach pie his wife and daughter baked for him. It’s the fragrance of sugar and soft, aromatic cooked fruit, the taste of the pie in the air, which reminds him of the eerily similar flavor of the ...
2021-04-11 04:30:56 +0000 UTC
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“He killed each of them using his signature move; a move only he knew and which he never taught anyone, not even me. He punched through their skulls with his index finger. He was the greatest man who ever lived.” As delivered by “Sensei” (Alessandro Nivola), this bizarre eulogy for the late martial arts instructor known only as “Grandmaster” neatly encapsulates The Art of Self-Defense’s flattened, hyperbolic tone. Characters state their emotions in blunt, uncomfortably ...
2021-04-09 15:49:54 +0000 UTC
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Sexual anxiety has been an animating force of the horror genre since its inception. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's’ 1812 collection of European children’s stories, is stuffed to the gills with incest, bride theft, and all manner of unsavory undertones, all echoing even older oral and written traditions from around the world. It’s not hard to draw a line from the infanticidal cannibalism of the Titans to, say, the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992...
2021-04-05 19:46:27 +0000 UTC
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Cronenberg’s work in the mid to late oughts is a fascinating puzzle, outwardly at odds with his seminally grotesque 80s and 90s filmography, inwardly pursuing many of the same ideas in quieter visual language, the things he spent decades sublimating into a noxious, swirling cloud condensing once again into cool and colorless beads of moisture. Codependency and compulsory connection. A particular panicky, flop sweat-stinking strain of misogyny. And of course the body. The body, the body, the...
2021-04-04 17:58:33 +0000 UTC
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Eastern Promises opens with a barber forcing his developmentally disabled son to kill a Russian gangster in the middle of a haircut. It’s a heart-rending moment, this callous man’s brutality toward his child, his impatience with the young man’s fear and hesitation, and then the grotesque physicality of the act itself. Another director might have had the actor draw his straight razor swiftly across the gangster’s throat, but this is Cronenberg: the kid saws at the guy’s voca...
2021-04-03 03:01:00 +0000 UTC
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There’s a moment in Godzilla vs. Kong when everything snaps together, when the blur of crumbling skyscrapers and massive hills of muscle, fur, and scales resolves into a coherent ballet of movie magic as Godzilla completely shithouses the ape. It lasts about twenty-seven seconds and occurs fifteen minutes before credits roll. The rest is a bog-standard tangle of godawful CGI, slapdash human subplots, and astonishingly stupid music cues. Whenever a thing comes onscreen, the movie fi...
2021-04-01 05:26:41 +0000 UTC
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The Mummy is such a good action flick, big and shaggy and brilliantly scored by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Some of its CGI hasn’t aged well, it trades freely in embarrassing racist stereotypes, and its mythology is a little convenient and convoluted, but as a coda to both the romantic historical epics and wise-cracking action movies of the 90s it fires on all cylinders right from the jump. The opening battle sequence, the glib little auction-cum-hanging, the delightful horse versus ...
2021-03-30 00:10:18 +0000 UTC
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A sniveling salaryman deformed by parasitic metal implants lurches through his living room, a huge priapic drill jutting from his groin as he alternately blubbers at and berates his girlfriend for being repulsed by his appearance. Like all of Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s bodily imagery, the colossal and deadly drill penis is ultimately a pathetic object, unwieldy and near-useless, confining its bearer to a state of frustrated and humiliating isolation. The intense physical anxiety from w...
2021-03-29 05:40:39 +0000 UTC
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“You know that child’s game?” asks cult pastor Arthur Parsons (the inimitable Stephen Root). “You say your own name enough times and it becomes just… gibberish. But if repetition alone has the power to reduce it so, then which is true: your name, or the gibberish?” The Empty Man, David Prior’s little-seen 2020 occult horror flick, structures itself around this question, and the fakeouts it pulls in that vein are a particular delight for horror fans sick and tired of dea...
2021-03-27 23:18:21 +0000 UTC
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It’s so much worse to see a promising movie take a hard right into predictable mediocrity than it is to see one fail ambitiously. Border, Ali Abbasi’s 2018 fantasy film about Neanderthal-like trolls living unknown to themselves and one another in modern-day Sweden, pushes boldly into material about ugliness, desire, queerness, and conformity in ways other movies typically shy away from, but its second half relies on a gloomily staid plot twist which boils all its complex subject ...
2021-03-25 21:26:21 +0000 UTC
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“It could be a person who, in his own loony way,” says police lieutenant-cum-serial killer John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones) to photographer of the glamorous obscene Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway), “feels your work is promoting porno and decadence… and he has a mission to clean up the world.” Eyes of Laura Mars may whiff its last at-bat with the sudden introduction of a cheesy split personality twist, but for the rest of its runtime it reflects with admirable clarity on the ever-po...
2021-03-22 19:54:36 +0000 UTC
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Four hours, two minutes, and thirteen seconds. Zack Snyder’s Justice League clocks in a full half-hour longer than Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, an hour and fifteen longer than Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and edges out Jackson’s Return of the King cut by nearly twenty minutes (though it’s nine minutes shorter than Return’s extended cut). Of course it’s facile to hold big-budget shlock like Snyder’s film up against a few of cinema’s defining ...
2021-03-18 22:34:10 +0000 UTC
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Never in my life have I heard sound design as bad as the Foley in The Guest, Adam Wingard’s not-quite-weird-enough thriller about a handsome, clean-cut young man who shows up on the doorstep of a family’s house and insinuates himself into their lives. There’s an audible “whoosh” like something out of old Hong Kong cinema when, during a bar fight, interloper David Collins turns toward a new threat. Every punch is accompanied by a sound like a wet towel snapping against bare ...
2021-03-18 04:18:48 +0000 UTC
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Few movies have the balls to flatly state that actor Peter Falk descended from on high to live a mortal life, trading in his wings and holy armor for a rumpled raincoat. Wings of Desire is one such film. Its balance between solemnity and easy, natural humor transforms what might in hands less skilled than Wenders’ have been an exercise in trite slice of life vignettes into a profound meditation on the minutiae which constitute human existence, the fleeting thoughts and contradictio...
2021-03-14 00:26:26 +0000 UTC
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Come True isn’t the sort of movie you’d expect to leave you shaken afterward. Its pace is glacial, its story minimal, its characters fairly thinly sketched. The horror comes from the intense pressure it exerts through careful guiding of the viewers’ eye and the slow, inexorable momentum of the camera in its astonishing dream sequences. By the time the film establishes the format of its dreams — a quiet, gliding progress through static scenes of desolate nature and institution...
2021-03-13 02:49:15 +0000 UTC
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“I’m not like you,” says Karen (Otmara Marrero) to her much older ex-lover, D. (Sonya Walger). The older woman arches an eyebrow. “And what am I like?” Karen’s reply is to the point, her voice and expression cold with disdain. One word. “Old.” Clementine, Lara Gallagher’s romantic drama about intergenerational lesbian connection, certainly has age and aging on its mind. Who’s too old for whom, who looks what age; women putting on each other’s clothes, styling ea...
2021-03-08 18:44:13 +0000 UTC
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I went on Annie Rose Malamet's Girls, Guts, and Giallo podcast to talk about Julia Ducournau's RAW, a brilliant cannibalism movie about thinness, white femininity, and eating.
2021-03-05 20:26:48 +0000 UTC
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There’s something ratlike about Tom Ripley. It’s not Matt Damon’s square, all-American features, nor his ever so slightly effeminate body language, nor his eloquent but parrot-like way of speaking. It’s something about his eyes, which become panicked and flat like an animal’s whenever something threatens to penetrate the farrago of lies surrounding his identity and actions, or perhaps about the white teeth he flashes in tight, anxious smiles when confronted by a contradiction in his...
2021-03-05 16:40:15 +0000 UTC
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Stage performer Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance as the titular maid in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc is the stuff of cinematic legend. Her wild stare and tremulous body language, her naive and yet deeply dignified devotion; she never took another major role in film, but her intense commitment to the part of Joan has echoed down through the medium’s history. “Will I be with you in Paradise tonight?” she asks the crucifix she cradles in her arm...
2021-02-25 22:26:09 +0000 UTC
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