scumbelievable

In the Flesh: The First Omen

A few lines of dialogue that ring a little tin-eared. A final sequence which, while not bad, exists solely to tie things into a franchise. Aside from these minor and fleeting imperfections, Arkasha Stevenson’s directorial debut is a veritable great white shark of a movie, a ton and change of teeth and savage muscle ripping into anything it can get at, the very definition of all killer, no fil...

In the Flesh: The Taste of Things

Oysters nestled in soft pats of butter, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and topped with little pyramids of glistening black caviar. Ice cream spread with a wooden spoon between rounds of moist, light sponge, then encrusted in a cocoon of French meringue, drizzled in liquor, and limned with barely visible fire. How old were you when you first learned to savor food, to name its component ingredients, ...

In the Flesh: Baby Reindeer

It’s been a long time since something rattled me so badly I had to step back and shake it off, my skin crawling, nausea roiling my stomach. Baby Reindeer rattled me that badly. I set it aside for a day before returning to it, and when I did, it slugged me again just as hard. There’s something about the show’s combination of abject, squalid wretchedness and black comedy that squir...

In the Flesh: I Saw the TV Glow

“I’m sorry,” wheezes Owen (Justice Smith), limping through the dingy innards of the Chuck E. Cheese-like purgatory where he’s worked for twenty years. “I’m sorry about earlier. This new medication I’m on.” The business’s patrons ignore him, lost in their cheap diversions, not caring that this human being is suffocating in front of them. Many of these diversions are licensed ga...

In the Flesh: Challengers

Guadagnino’s always been an odd duck for me, recognizably freaky in his preoccupations, but too tame and visually restrained to get me fully onboard with his execution. Challengers is easily my favorite thing he’s done to date, but it suffers from the same lifeless visuals and mediocre, directionless scoring that have derailed so many of his films. The recurring low, listless pulse...

June 2024 Schedule: DYKE NIGHT

6/2, 1pm & 7pm: LOVE LIES BLEEDING
6/5, 7pm: WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE
6/9, 1pm & 7pm: BOUND
6/12, 7pm: THE HANDMAIDEN
6/16, 1pm & 7pm: NEON DEMON
6/19, 7pm: TAR
6/23, 1pm & 7pm: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE
6/26, 7pm: THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

In the Flesh: Immaculate

The Catholic Church’s obsessive quest to maintain control over the bodies of women, through means both psychological and legal, has resulted in over a century of devastating misogynist violence, the legacy of which runs like a trail of bloody afterbirth from the mass graves under its Magdalene Laundries to the truly incomprehensible suffering of its successful bid to deny access to abortion o...

In the Flesh: Monkey Man

Stylish, visually accomplished, and gratifyingly preoccupied with impact and momentum, Monkey Man is an impressive little action flick with a bracing spine of anti-Hinduvta politics. It shows definite signs of debut feature weakness — overreliance on rapid cuts, needle drops too broad and obvious, a little too much enthusiasm for Dutch angles — but if star and director Dev Patel is...

In the Flesh: Infested

Fear of spiders is so commonplace that virtually everyone knows the clinical term for it, but making audiences feel the unreasoning, hysterical intensity of that fear is a completely different order of business. Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested captures that feeling exactly, earning the descriptor “skin-crawling” with more nightmarish urgency than anything else in recent m...

In the Flesh: Shōgun

Shōgun is something special, the kind of adaptational success you hope against hope to see at least once in a blue moon. A difficult and problematic piece of source material reworked by talented artists and technicians into something smart enough to see and exploit its own fault lines in order to enrich the text, the show stands as an early contender for the best of 2024. It work...

In the Flesh: History of the Occult

“The future is over,” says Federicci (Agustín Recondo), pronouncing each syllable like he’s tonguing the empty socket of a pulled tooth. He can’t remember where he heard the phrase, or what it means, or how it might pertain to the black magic-inflected mystery at the heart of this disturbing and ambitious film, but the dread remains. The future is over, pulled apart by a feckl...

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 behin...

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 ga...

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 sc...

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...

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 hott...

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,...

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 ...

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 cir...

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. T...

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 curio...

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 —...

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,...

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. Rea...