A rider in black (Wojciech Pszoniak) arrives at a convent in the midst of the Prussian invasion of Poland. In aspect he resembles a sort of living Repin painting, the wild-eyed tyrant of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 sprung to life. It’s his manic body language, his exaggerated expressions and wild declarations which animate much of Andrzej Żuławski’s The Devil, a melodramatic picaresque in which a series of chaotic spectacles whirl around them...
2021-02-19 16:12:37 +0000 UTC
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The opening of Impetigore, Joko Anwar’s riveting 2019 folk horror flick, establishes the relationship between twentysomething tollbooth workers Maya (Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita) with such breathless confidence that when the movie stops cutting back and forth between them at lightning speed as they chatter even faster over speakerphone, it feels like slamming into a brick wall. In part it’s that kind of masterful pacing — with only a few minor wobbles related to exposit...
2021-02-19 03:54:42 +0000 UTC
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Lanthimos’s whole thing, the magical realist worlds of flat affects and disorienting angles he assembles so meticulously in his films, is strong medicine by any measure. The Killing of a Sacred Deer pushes even deeper than its immediate predecessor, The Lobster, into the director’s peculiar sensibilities, a choice resulting in a movie at once richer and more off-putting than his other work. Where The Lobster focuses on the colossal social stakes of minute interp...
2021-02-18 00:40:07 +0000 UTC
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The script isn’t much, the score’s already departed entirely from my memory, and where the story isn’t bog-standard it sags and loses its direction, but Julius Avery’s Overlord scores considerable points for knowing exactly what it is. At no point does it attempt to escape its pulpy roots or offer complex commentary, and while the end result is shallow it manages to be both largely good to look at and entertaining. Jovan Adepo is charming as the young and idealistic Private B...
2021-02-17 02:50:31 +0000 UTC
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“...political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!.” As twenty-one-year-old Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton, Daniel Kaluuya delivers the famous revolutionary’s words with a smooth, fluid ease, an effortless charisma which at times gives way to the gentle earnestness of a boy who learned too young to be a man. “I’m not shy,” he tells his lover Deborah (Dominique Fishback) duri...
2021-02-15 06:53:59 +0000 UTC
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Women in dresses of red and blue roughspun sing beneath branching webs of yarn drawn taut and interwoven. A painting of a long-haired man’s face stares Christ-like from the side panel of a rusted caravan. What are we to make of this pastoral cult, all slender women — all but one of whom are white — of varying ages, a flock divided into “wives” and their daughters by their small world’s central figure, the Shepherd (Michiel Huisman)? On the surface, evident brainwashing aside, the ...
2021-02-12 15:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Being a fat woman is an exercise in learning to love things that hate you. Your favorite art will mock your body, your lovers will quest vainly for compliments that don’t engage your actual appearance, theater seats will bruise your hips, and on, and on, and on until the grating whine of the world’s violence toward your body becomes inextricably enmeshed with every moment of real joy you’ll ever feel. Perhaps the single most important factor in the early death of horror author and fat w...
2021-02-12 04:43:17 +0000 UTC
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Space Sweepers is not, as some critics would have it, “Parasite in space”, an assertion so transparently racist in its flattening of one of the most fruitful national cinematic cultures of the century that it merits little discussion. Jo Sung-hee’s sci-fi action flick may share a few themes with Bong Joon-ho’s blackly comedic film — the struggle of the working poor, the willful callousness of the rich — but at heart it’s feel-good pulp, a classic story of a gan...
2021-02-10 06:50:31 +0000 UTC
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How I made it this far in life without seeing DePalma’s Scarface is a pretty good question, but man, there’s nothing in the world like Al Pacino in this movie. He’s like a speak-n’-spell having a psychotic break, his slack facial expression and robotic, repetitive way of talking growing more and more disconnected from reality as his wealth and status increase. He says “okay?” and “mang” so many times and with such numb disregard for the expression and body language of...
2021-02-08 07:40:05 +0000 UTC
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There’s something about Alison Brie’s enormous Betty Boop eyes that’s always read as slightly upsetting to me. There’s just so much area; the idea of something touching their wet, glistening surfaces is too immediate. In Horse Girl, which she co-wrote with director Jeff Baena, they’re so tremblingly wide and lost that the rest of her seems almost childlike, her head a toddler’s bobbling oversized cranium. Her childish appearance only serves to heighten the agony ...
2021-02-05 08:04:34 +0000 UTC
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That American society cannot weather a respiratory pandemic is no longer something that can take an audience by surprise. Even so, the bleak, spare, tightly-built engine of Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes at Night feels imperative rather than obsolete, digging its fingers into the paper-thin connective tissue joining neighbor to neighbor, father to son, and so on in the fast-decaying corpse of America’s empire. Its focus on the brittle, nihilistic nature of whiteness and of the idea...
2021-02-05 06:19:02 +0000 UTC
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You seldom see a film approach self-harm with the understanding that it serves a purpose. When we cut and burn and prick and beat ourselves, it’s because no other release is conceivable or accessible. It’s an escape from the cloying physical prison of panic, of suicidal spiraling, of flurrying thoughts and the crushing burden of loneliness. Rose Glass’s Saint Maud is the rare film to encompass all of that complex suffering effortlessly, to sketch a protagonist just self-aware e...
2021-02-03 02:04:06 +0000 UTC
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It’s seldom I get the chance to sit down and watch something every frame of which is absolutely visually riveting. It’s enough to make me glad for Ash Is Purest White’s glacial pace and tone, content to sit and watch as director Jia Zhangke and cinematographer Eric Gautier glide through the ghostly emptiness of Datong prefecture circa 2001, derelict housing blocks and darkened warehouses worn down by time, storefronts blasted and weathered by wind and rain. In karaoke bars and ...
2021-02-01 07:00:02 +0000 UTC
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How do you take a premise like the lycanthrophy-afflicted son of a land baron feeding off his father’s tenants and totally fail to do anything approaching class analysis? Whatever the secret to that particular trick, Eight for Silver knows it. It takes a setup perfectly primed to take a bloody mouthful out of the working poor’s relationship to their social superiors and wastes it completely on an inert performance by Boyd Holbrook as Sad Dead Wife (Also Dead Child) Guy. It boggle...
2021-01-31 07:14:07 +0000 UTC
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Pornography—notoriously difficult to define, its moral weight and cultural impact bitterly contested not just by prudes and lewds but by opposing factions within movements like feminism—has always been a dicey subject for discussion. Is it art or exploitation? Does it objectify women or empower us? In Park Chan-Wook’s 2016 twisty lesbian thriller The Handmaiden, the complex nature of porn takes center stage, explored with real insight in a story concerned not just with the abus...
2021-01-29 22:47:38 +0000 UTC
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In film, faces and bodies are part of a visual language which communicates the nature of a fictional world. Take the smooth, generically beautiful faces of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which notably includes seven movies headlined by tall, muscular white men named “Chris.” Outside the realm of mainstream blockbusters, though, art speaks in a dialect both more familiar and less readily digestible. Faces and bodies outside the main—though among actors men are afforded a much wider range...
2021-01-29 16:51:20 +0000 UTC
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Any movie with the balls to cast Quentin Crisp (incidentally a trans woman who never transitioned) as Elizabeth I is a movie I can’t help but root for, and Sally Potter’s Orlando uses it just as its jumping-off point. By the fifteen-minute mark we’ve seen royals titter at the spectacle of a young person encased in ice beneath the surface of the Thames, the Jacobean court practicing tandem ice skating, and the queen borne over the water by barge while a man, who will later reapp...
2021-01-29 00:30:04 +0000 UTC
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There’s something so distinctly dykey about Ammonite, something in its obsessive focus on labor and chores, on feet and piss and clothes and all the things we half-understand to be proxies for the elusive concept of the beloved which hews closer to The Duke of Burgundy with its bondage chests and oral watersports than the staid, unsexy suggestiveness of, say, The Favourite, which only touches horniness when it’s actively trying to avoid it. Perhaps it’s the se...
2021-01-23 04:50:50 +0000 UTC
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The first half of 3 Women, Robert Altman’s 1977 avant garde classic, is perhaps the most stressful thing I’ve ever watched. The friction between Shy, submissive Pinkie Rose (Sissy Spacek) and vapid, self-absorbed Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) is nails on a chalkboard, Millie’s petty cruelties and Pinkie’s numb, stunted affect almost unbearably dysfunctional in action. It’s like watching a pissy, insecure teenager try to raise a child she doesn’t want. The minuscule s...
2021-01-22 17:51:57 +0000 UTC
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Rival crews meet by night in an abandoned warehouse. At issue is some unknown valuable, possessed by one side and desired by the other, and when no solution is forthcoming the two gangs quickly discover that neither of them called the sitdown. Tempers flare. Guns come out. Then, at the precipice of violence, in walks a man in black. This is how the Punisher's story ends, Frank Castle roaring in rage and hurt as he shreds men with automatic weapons, a dark figure spitting fire and lead into th...
2021-01-20 20:38:53 +0000 UTC
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They rise from the long grass beside the river as the merchant and his men go by, one leading an ox laden with bags of rice, dried herbs, salt, and spices, and clay pots full of what smells to the hunters like liquor, strong and good. The beast shakes her head in irritation and flicks her tail to clear the flies from her dark haunches. The first hunter, the wind stirring her mane of coarse black hair, looks to her older sister and emits a low, questioning whimper. Bared fangs are the answer.<...
2021-01-17 20:49:47 +0000 UTC
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A rancid little mother/daughter drama stretched out over two centuries and told in overlapping, contradictory skeins of personal narrative, Byzantium follows Clare/Clara/Camilla Webb (Gemma Arterton in the only role I’ve ever really loved her for) and her daughter Eleanor (Saorise Ronan), a vampire coven of two eternally on the run from forces unknown. Eleanor, eternally sixteen, longs to be known, to communicate the vast depth of her past. Clare dismisses her long life as an irrel...
2021-01-17 00:25:28 +0000 UTC
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The image of the crying dad is ubiquitous in popular culture, a kind of archetypal psychological upset within the framework of the American nuclear family which robs a child of the illusion of their father’s invulnerability. The second layer of horror present in this image, though, is that the unusual nature of this spectacle suggests an emotional deficit in the parent in question, an inability to feel or express sufficiently. Many of us also know that in a father, weakness might lead easil...
2021-01-16 15:01:01 +0000 UTC
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There’s a moment in Alucarda, Juan López Moctezuma’s 1977 cult lesbian horror classic, where garish melodrama spills into bitter reality. From the top of a ponderous stone staircase the titular novice lashes out with her Satanic powers, engulfing the nuns and friars who tormented her and her beloved Justine in sheets of roaring flame reflected in her eyes, which shine flat and gold like those of an animal caught in a car’s headlights. Her impotent thrashing and spinning throug...
2021-01-15 17:30:31 +0000 UTC
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That this movie exists at all is baseline grotesque. John Landis killed a man and two children through his own arrogance and negligence while filming part of the Twilight Zone movie, and here’s his son Max consciously invoking the famous series entry ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ with a gremlin creature feature set on a B-17 flying fortress. On top of that, the younger Landis is a serial rapist and this movie is in part a clumsy attempt at exploring and overcoming the sexual haras...
2021-01-14 20:08:31 +0000 UTC
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Sometimes it feels like Deadwood never happened. With shows like Maniac and Bojack Horseman dominating conversations about mental illness in TV, it’s easy to forget that back in 2004 David Milch’s bloody, profane gold rush period piece broke trail on some of the most daring and empathetic portrayals of mentally ill characters in television history. It’s not my intent to look down my nose at people who enjoy Bojack Horseman’s therapy-session style of...
2021-01-12 20:12:15 +0000 UTC
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You’d have to be a pretty insightful and knowledgeable artist to do something worthwhile with the story of Matoaka, better known as Pocahontas — her childhood nickname and eventual use-name among early English colonists in what is now Virginia. Terrence Malick is not that artist. As a film his The New World has a few virtues, but at its root it is the most dishonest and repellent kind of historical narrative, twisting the abduction and rape of a native child into a story of star-...
2021-01-08 16:30:00 +0000 UTC
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How do you talk about a movie with such insight into sexual predation when its creator is himself a sexual predator? Roman Polanski’s Repulsion mines even closer to the lode of its director’s real-life behavior than the better-known Rosemary’s Baby, a case not of staggering unselfawareness, or even strictly of predator camouflage, but of the limits of insight in the context of art. Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That?, a landmark psychosocial text, discusse...
2021-01-02 04:04:26 +0000 UTC
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Tokyo Decadence, Ryū Murakami’s 1992 pink film, opens with submissive prostitute Ai strapped into a modified OBGYN’s chair as her sadist client waxes poetic about her status as the savior of Japanese womanhood, her sole qualification for which appears to be that he has sexual access to her. The boilerplate misogyny he tries to pass off as his personal philosophy on feminine worth seems to echo through the rest of the film as we encounter a succession of cringing, whining men wit...
2021-01-02 03:19:02 +0000 UTC
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The giant mecha genre is, at its heart, a teen power fantasy. Step into a cockpit and suddenly your body is a hundred times larger, armored and invulnerable. You can fly through space, dodge missiles, and cut starships in half with swords made of diamond-edged light. Nothing can stop you. Neon Genesis Evangelion—Hideaki Anno’s brutal, convoluted 1995 anime in which three teenagers must bond with and pilot the bio-robotic constructs known as Evangelions to prevent human...
2020-12-28 21:37:05 +0000 UTC
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