I’ve seen so few depictions of demonic possession that did anything for me. Sure there’s The Exorcist’s putrid, profane Regan, Raimi’s gleefully repulsive Deadites, the malignant mote of wandering light in Hereditary, but in the main horror movies are content to stop at “evil”. Not so for Tilman Singer’s Luz, which makes of its demon a sort of dreamlike ...
2024-10-03 19:35:14 +0000 UTC View Post
TCBY Treats. Mr. Buffalo. Pink Dot. Cheesecake Factory. It’s no accident that these symbols of metastasizing chain mediocrity keep popping up throughout Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. They reek of the New Money naivete which is the beating heart of the Menendez family, brutalized people whose sudden access to money and power has allowed their generational trauma to grow ...
2024-09-27 05:53:26 +0000 UTC View Post
“...and at fifty, it stops,” says Harvey (Dennis Quaid), stripping and eating shrimp like he’s Denethor turned loose in a tomato patch. “What stops?” asks Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a faded actress in the process of losing her last toehold in the realm of fame, a vapid exercise show in the vein of Jane Fonda’s similar television work in the ‘80s. She knows the answer, of cour...
2024-09-21 00:28:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Now that’s how you make a creature feature. Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is wall to wall hearty genre fare, from the beautifully introduced and fleshed out homo cuculidae, hominid brood parasites who let humans raise their young before coming to reclaim them as adolescence approaches, to the ever more battered and busted-up protagonist, Gretchen (Hunter Schaefer), digging deep t...
2024-09-18 05:35:32 +0000 UTC View Post
To paraphrase another great North American, there is an idea of a Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), some kind of abstraction, but though you can shake her hand and feel flesh gripping yours, she simply is not there. Gariépy is magnificent in the role of this dead-eyed ghoul, a model and online poker shark who watches snuff films of teenage girls without emotion and toys with the people ...
2024-09-11 01:27:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Take First Blood, swirl it together with Chinatown, and you’ve got a pretty solid bead on where director Jeremy Saulnier’s going with Rebel Ridge. His protagonist isn’t as riveting or dynamic as John Rambo, his script isn’t as tight or as cutting as Robert Towne’s, but he’s got a handle on the spirit of these films, the righteous wrath of the victim of pol...
2024-09-10 03:10:00 +0000 UTC View Post
The Hong Kong of director Soi Cheang's Limbo is half a step from an open sewer the size of a city, its alleyways choked with garbage, its buildings looming dead and abandoned over filthy streets. Its police are burned-out, grieving wrecks like Cham Lau (Gordon Lam) or fresh-faced young fusspots with mouths full of rotting teeth, like Will Yam (Mason Lee). Everything’s wet. Everything...
2024-09-09 05:08:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Tonight at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, it's Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW as we continue our month of Hitchcock's masterpieces!
Membership is $10 a month, screenings are 7pm Wednesdays and 1pm and 7pm Sundays, all times EST!
Tonight at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, it's Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO as we continue our month of Hitchcock's masterpieces!
Membership is $10 a month, screenings are 7pm Wednesdays and 1pm and 7pm Sundays, all times EST!
“I did it,” blubbers Robert (Jesse Plemmons) as he crawls into the arms of his lover, employer, and dom, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). “I did good, I did it, I did it.” The act he’s describing, and for which he is welcomed warmly back into Raymond’s arms after finding himself rebuffed over an earlier refusal to submit, is the kidnapping and vehicular homicide of a critically injured car c...
2024-09-02 19:37:58 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s been a hell of a year for micro-budget filmmaking, and actor/director Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is one of the most delightful entries in its weight class. With a visual sensibility somewhere between Adult Swim’s most aesthetically obtuse material and the crude collage and slapped-together animation of Wonder Showzen or, perhaps more relevantly, frenetic YouTu...
2024-08-11 07:01:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Shot in rich, saturated Super 16mm, Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak adapts Tolstoy’s short story ‘The Family of the Vourdalak’ into something at once intimately unsettling and imbued with the sense of suspended reality essential to all great fairy tales. Structured around the disturbing presence of the titular puppet, voiced by Beau himself with sepulchral old-world gravitas, the f...
2024-08-08 21:08:52 +0000 UTC View Post
The melancholy in lord Corlys’s (Steve Toussaint) voice as he tells Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) the name of his rechristened flagship is the first of the season finale’s reminders of all the death that has already come about as a result of this protracted family squabble. And yet by renaming his ship The Queen Who Never Was, in homage to his departed wife the princess Rhaenys (Eve Bes...
2024-08-05 06:00:24 +0000 UTC View Post
On a fundamental level, I think if you make a movie in which the Devil is real you should probably be able to conceive of more spectacular acts of evil than nuclear family murder/suicide. It’s clear director Osgood Perkins has some thoughts about the emptiness and malice of his suburban setting, but as in his previous I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, there’s neither a...
2024-08-02 04:10:20 +0000 UTC View Post
‘The Red Sowing’ comes as close to horror movie territory as House of the Dragon has yet dared to tread. Its penultimate sequence in which a slew of prospective bastards of House Targaryen attempt to bind and mount the ancient dragon Vermithor is a charnel house nightmare like something out of The Descent, the hoary old monster gorging itself on burning human corpses while...
2024-07-29 03:14:14 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s a lot to be said for the quiet competence with which Damian McCarthy and his team make movies. No lazy shots, no serious goofs in the writing, good solid jump scares with adequate buildup and expert deployment. Oddity may pose few novel ideas, but its bona fides are there for anyone to see. It has a clear connection to both its genre and cinema as a whole, hearkening back to ...
2024-07-25 02:51:05 +0000 UTC View Post
The hottest televised kiss since The Americans segued from emergency dental surgery into sucking face, a cast of characters opening up with exquisite vulnerability as their world falls apart around them, the dragon Seasmoke bathing ser Steffon Darklyn (Anthony Flanagan) in torrents of flame at the knight’s moment of triumph, a riot in King’s Landing as the smallfolk from whom the e...
2024-07-22 04:21:14 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s so much passion and attention to detail evident in every scene of Andrew Rakich’s The Sudbury Devil, such evident love of film and history, and such respect for the real people who lived in the depths of the past. It’s hard to care about cut-rate special effects and the absence of professional lighting when the production has so much talent in the wings and such a keen an...
2024-07-20 21:13:44 +0000 UTC View Post
“Jailbroken robots, all they do is get high and screw all the time,” says hacker Roberta Williams (Marie Bouvet) of her robotic partner LEM (Thomas Roditi) with a mixture of fondness and irritation. In a movie so concerned with reasons for being and with their dark, nonsensical corporate reflections, it can hardly be an accidental line. All anyone really wants is to feel good and experience...
2024-07-20 00:06:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Emma. Laena. Queen Alyssa. The dead of House Targaryen crowd in close around prince Daemon, goading and tormenting him, embodying his lusts and insecurities. In his waking dream he takes his brother’s wife to bed as she murmurs that it was he who should have worn the crown. In the midst of lovemaking she becomes his mother, who died when he was very young, and whispers that he is her favorite...
2024-07-15 04:02:06 +0000 UTC View Post
I don’t think you could find a more shopworn story template than the one Wes Ball breaks out for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. An uncertain but promising young man, his village enslaved by raiding imperialists, strikes out on his own to discover the truth of the world, come of age, and rescue his family and love interest. About as original as those doughy half-baked sugar cookie...
2024-07-13 00:30:02 +0000 UTC View Post
“The King has fallen, we must find him,” says ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) to a soldier kneeling on the field of battle in the shadow of Rook’s Rest. When Cole puts a hand on the man’s shoulder to rouse him, he collapses, bones and ashes spilling from his gaping visor. That’s the cost of covering yourself in glory. Cole may be a loathsome thug who helped foment a coup and a civil...
2024-07-08 02:43:32 +0000 UTC View Post
“ Jesus turned water to wine,” says the nameless nun (Frankie Thorn) to her confessor, discussing her rape at the hands of two young men. “I ought to have turned bitter semen to fertile sperm -- hatred to love. And maybe to have saved their souls. They did not love me. I ought to have loved them. As Jesus loved those who reviled him.” It’s a staggering declaration, the kind of human a...
2024-07-07 03:46:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Special meat. That’s what the world calls human flesh in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, a gripping, grisly story intimately concerned with the bestowing and revocation of humanity. A “head”, as the novel refers to domesticated humans bred and slaughtered for their meat, is not a person. Referring to one as a human being, we soon learn, carries stiff social ...
2024-07-04 21:12:17 +0000 UTC View Post
David Foster Wallace once compared depression to standing at a window in a burning house. The only ways to escape are to jump, meaning certain death, or to turn and descend through the flames, with no guarantee but misery, for a chance at survival. It’s an idea that echoed through my thoughts as I watched Agnes (Anja Plaschg) struggle to navigate the moral and psychological landscape of rural...
2024-07-03 04:31:44 +0000 UTC View Post
In a Violent Nature opens with a decent oner as the undead mass murderer Johnny (Ry Barrett) claws his way out of the grave and trudges through the forest to recover his dead mother’s necklace from the thoughtless, ornery hick who stole it in passing. In case we couldn’t follow this Byzantine plot, we get a little snippet of Johnny’s memory of his mother talking to him in Hallmar...
2024-07-02 00:52:03 +0000 UTC View Post
“I forgive you,” says queen Helaena (Phia Saban) to her mother, the dowager queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke). Alicent is stricken by her daughter’s words, her huge, expressive eyes alive with tumultuous emotion. It’s a striking moment in an episode propelled along by sunk-cost willful ignorance, ancient grudges of forgotten origin, and wrongs endlessly relitigated and used as grounds for fu...
2024-07-01 03:03:00 +0000 UTC View Post
“Another one burnt in the tray, like bread,” sighs the ravaged vampire Daciana (Diana Gheorghian), looking down at her failed fledgling. What is there to cling to when the wind of eternity has worn everything around you smooth as glass? This aching loneliness, and the fear of that loneliness, is the beating heart of Interview with the Vampire, the second season of which surpasses t...
2024-06-30 02:52:31 +0000 UTC View Post
A man tortures his own grief-addled granddaughter with the sight of her beheaded child for the sake of political messaging. A sadistic thug forces a loyal knight to waste his life in order to assuage his own pitiful guilt. Twin brothers sworn to rival claimants to the Iron Throne die in a brutal duel with one another, one by the other’s sword, the survivor by his own. What does it all have in...
2024-06-24 04:40:20 +0000 UTC View Post
You see a lot of overplayed hands in season premieres. Screaming, fighting, bombast, none of which are bad TV on their own, of course, but deployed in the absence of supporting context solely to ratchet up the drama and make sure people tune in again next week. Not here. Series co-creator Ryan Condal’s script is full of subtle characterization, surprising turns, and throat-tightening suspense...
2024-06-17 03:36:49 +0000 UTC View Post