scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Late Night with the Devil

David Dastamalchian does a lot of things very well. Conjuring up a believable turn as a late-night talk show host, it turns out, isn’t one of them. Late-night host Jack Delroy’s as flat as a pancake and as deep as a puddle, a cardboard cutout with “protagonist” scribbled across it, and there’s nothing in Dastamalchian’s performance that so much as hints at anything interesting behind this feeble characterization. It’s not that a low-budget exorcism flick needs to conjure up a St...

May 2024 Schedule: BLACK BAG

5/1, 7pm: BURN AFTER READING
5/5, 1 & 7pm: CASINO ROYALE
5/8, 7pm: IMPERIUM
5/12, 1 & 7pm: DEEP COVER
5/15, 7pm: JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
5/19, 1 & 7pm: TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY
5/22, 7pm: THE LIVES OF OTHERS
5/26, 1 & 7pm: LUST, CAUTION

Trailer by Vincent Ash Renee

In the Flesh: Beyond Outrage

What if you stripped all the emotion out of, say, The Godfather 2? What if you cut all the scenes of home life, all the malaprops and blunders and arguments from The Sopranos? In a lot of ways it feels like Beyond Outrage is the Yakuza movie Takeshi Kitano has been working toward making for the last thirty years, the culmination of his project of slowly peeling the gangster film genre apart until only its most unromantic elements are left. We’re far away from the ...

In the Flesh: Road House (2024)

I like watching men beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. I like oddball pugilists and seedy Florida scenery. I like Jake Gyllenhaal! Doug Liman’s Road House, a remake of the belovedly gonzo and meat-headed 1989 Patrick Swayze classic, is a likable movie, big and muscular and just the right amount of weird. The bizarre fisheye and first-person shots of its propulsive action scenes really put you into the violence, and the shaky cam stuff is among the best I’ve seen. It’s...

In the Flesh: Stopmotion

My defining flaw in all my relationships has always been my propensity for disappearing into my work. Finding a little success as a writer has only made it worse. I suppose I feel I have a better excuse now, that by burying my head in reviews and novels and comic scripts I’m providing for my loved ones against an increasingly uncertain future. In practice, it means that when I’m stressed or depressed or upset, I neglect those same people and turn away from the comfort and support they can...

In the Flesh: Love Lies Bleeding

Are there weaknesses in Rose Glass’s sophomore picture? Yes. Does its reach exceed the grasp of its special effects from time to time? Sure. It’s not a perfect movie, not the kind of thing you could call a masterpiece. Shot composition is often a little hinky, and it could really stand an injection of color, but my God, it’s a banger anyway. Kristen Stewart has never in her life been hotter than she is here as Lou, a sleazy, chain-smoking dirtbag dyke plunging toilets and wiping down be...

April 2024 Schedule: BEATDOWN

4/3, 7pm: BREAKDOWN
4/7, 1pm & 7pm: BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99
4/10, 7pm: DRUNKEN MASTER
4/14, 1pm & 7pm: CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
4/17, 7pm: TRUE LIES
4/21, 1pm & 7pm: FIRST BLOOD
4/24, 7pm: KUNG FU HUSTLE
4/28, 1pm & 7pm: HARDCORE HENRY

In the Flesh: The Aviator

Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) pushes the field of aviation forward through brute stubbornness and creativity unfettered by knowledge or economic restraint. He pushes and pulls and demands and demands again, throwing himself against reality, and because the industry is both hidebound and still very young, reality has quite a bit of give in it. But when it comes to its more granular elements, to bodies, to emotions, to his own reactions to stimuli, to sound and light and skin, reality isn�...

Preview: Cuckoo Prologue

Prologue: The Good News

Angel’s Climb, Montana

1991

Monica Howard couldn’t stop cleaning. It was two days until her daughter Casey — seventeen in three weeks — came home from camp, a thought that nagged at the back of her mind every moment she wasn’t scrubbing, sweeping, tidying, mopping, or folding something. If the house is clean enough, her subconscious whispered to her as she lay awake most nights beside her husband Wayne’s snoring bulk, then maybe it would b...

In the Flesh: Dune Part 2

Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) hangs on the reins of a massive sandworm as it streaks through the desert, dunes collapsing in its wake like tidal waves in colorless slow-motion. Feyd Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) duels an Atreides retainer in sun-bleached photo negative while masked figures like nightmarish paper cutouts from a book of Commedia Dell’Arte archetypes circle closer and closer around them. Airships like floating H. R. Giger sculpture installations bombar...

In the Flesh: Sexy Beast Season One

I’m so incredibly pleased to have been proven wrong so many times in the past year. I try to go into every movie and TV show ready to be surprised and delighted, open to the possibility of joy, but living up to Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast is an order tall enough that I felt pretty bearish on the prospect when I first heard it was in process. And then, an embarrassment of riches. Tamsin Grieg giving the performance of a lifetime as Don Logan’s (Emun Elliott) monstrous sister, C...

In the Flesh: Poor Things

I think if this morning you’d asked me to sit down and watch a steampunk adaptation of Frankenstein where the monster was a hot girl and it ended with a happy polycule, I’d have told you where you could stick it. Having now seen Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, I can confidently say I’d have been dumb and wrong to turn you down. What a pure joy of a film this is, alive with curiosity and passion, buoyed by art direction and costuming somewhere between Eiko Ishioka and Jean Pier...

In the Flesh: The Zone of Interest

Every frame of the first half of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest looks like a painting made by an alternate universe Norman Rockwell who served enthusiastically in the Hitler Youth. The lederhosen, the rosy-cheeked children, the careful color grading to emphasize the Höss family’s extreme whiteness, the gardens and trellises and scenes of stereotypical Aryan domesticity — it all points toward a towering and fearful sentimentality, the manufacturing on an almost unfathom...

March 2024 Schedule: Vibe Check

3/3, 1pm &  7pm: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
3/6, 7pm: TITUS
3/10, 1pm & 7pm: SPEED RACER
3/13, 7pm: THE FALL
3/17, 1pm & 7pm: BRAZIL
3/20, 7pm: THE ISLAND OF LOST CHILDREN
3/24, 1pm & 7pm: DUNE
3/27, 7pm: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

In the Flesh: Life

That Daniel Espinosa’s Life is aping Alien hardly qualifies as an insight. Quarantine breaches, a terrifyingly efficient lifeform tearing through the crew of a claustrophobic spaceship, human dramas and institutional betrayals taking place in an environment a knife’s edge away from the obliterating emptiness of space — it clearly knows what it’s doing; the question is, does it do it well enough to justify retreading one of horror’s most iconic films? And the answer...

In the Flesh: Ready Player One

I recently met my boyfriend’s four-year-old twins, which was very sweet and special. During the interminable runtime of Ready Player One I found myself continually drawn back to the memory of these adorable children excitedly showing me each and every one of their toys and favorite objects, the things through which they’ve begun to understand and form ideas about the world. Ready Player One presents a world in which the endless listing of objects and trivia is the only m...

In the Flesh: Kids

It took me about half an hour to realize that what Kids reminded me of with its relentless walls of dialogue and incessant, irresistible encroachment of misery into the lives of its characters was The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. It’s as naturalistic as Cook is affected, to be sure, but Harmony Korine’s screenwriting debut shares that essential quality of too much sensation packed into not enough space, like hot vomit overflowing an air sickness bag...

In the Flesh: American Fiction

American Fiction succeeds in two ways: first, and rather indifferently, as literary fiction populated by the kind of well-rounded and complex, contradictory characters with which Thelonius “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) fills his unpopular but critically praised novels, and second (and much more substantially) as a series of reversals and fake-outs positioned with such care that they present a kind of shifting mirrored surface for the viewer, repeatedly baiting both white and Bl...

In the Flesh: Brawl in Cell Block 99

Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughan) is a piece of shit. In the first few minutes we know the man we watch as he surveils and terrorizes his wife, Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter), bloodying his hands in the act of tearing her car apart after she reveals she’s been seeing another man. Throughout Brawl in Cell Block 99 we watch him savage person after person as he chews his way through the prison system, pausing along the way to dispense racist provocations. In a way it’s a familiar format, ...