|Natalie Marlin| Noise was roiling in Olivier Assayas’s blood as the 20th century neared a close. At the end of his 1996 film Irma Vep, the director of the film-within-a-film has disavowed his initial attempt at a conventional filmmaking style. The star has left the picture. The narrative is… Continue reading
|Phil Kolas| Pulled pork tacos were a poor choice. That was my first thought when I started this movie. After the opening flash photography montage depicting half-decomposed human bodies, leading into the zoom-out reveal of… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| Last week I learned about the fate of the original house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It appears the house was cut into several pieces in the ‘90s and transported to a town 60 miles away. The house is now a restaurant in Kingsland, TX. This revelation is… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| Obedient tool. That phrase from the intertitles of Metropolis describes what a group of men desire in another science fiction film made decades later, The Stepford Wives (1975). In Metropolis… Continue reading
| Jackson Stern | Of all the corruption, illnesses, and injustices affecting the world today (you could count them on fifteen hands), few are as elusive as what many refer to as the “male loneliness epidemic.” We seem to discuss this very real sickness as if… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| “It’s Bleak” | The 1970 Peter Boyle film Joe is not part of our Bleak Week programming—though you’d be forgiven if you thought it was. Joe, which we programmed to kick off our Cantankerous Peter Boyle series, follows a wealthy advertising executive (Dennis Patrick) Continue reading
| Jake Rudegeair | Prepare to have your heart curdled and pressed. Prepare to have your nervous system rattled like a corpse-black skeleton in a crossroads cage. Elem Klimov’s last masterpiece COME AND SEE is cinema in the raw. It’s caustic, an aching descent into the ugliest, most engrossing… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| Claire Denis has always made monster movies. Or, at least, movies with monsters in them or, most commonly, movies about the survivors of monsters. Most of her films revolve around (or feature in a capacity) people who have intense sense of dread permeating… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| I didn’t fall for Scorsese initially, the same way I did for his contemporaries. Raging Bull left me cold. I hated the characters in Goodfellas too much to really latch on. Make no mistake—I encountered plenty of toxic masculinity in adolescence, just a brand that disguised… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| The Museum of Home Video is an online streaming show that took flight during the pandemic and seems to have created an empire. Started by Los Angeleno film programmer/distributor Brett Berg, it takes place at museumofhomevideo.com at 7:30 pm PST most Tuesday evenings. Since its inception in July… Continue reading
|Penny Folger| “There was no bigger disaster than Blow Out,” reminisces director Brian De Palma on the reception his film received when it was originally released in 1981. It’s a film that, 43 years later, is held in much higher esteem, even cited by Quentin Tarantino as… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| A man takes a photograph, inspiring another to write a story, inspiring another to make a film, inspiring another to…make another film. This is how it works now, losing the magic and mystery of folktales passed down generation upon generation via oral storytelling but gaining the benefits of … Continue reading
|Yuval Klein| With action, slapstick, deadpan machismo, a jazzy soundtrack, and avant-garde edits, the tone of Branded to Kill is set in an extensive and superbly shot shootout scene, in which our protagonist, a “highly ranked” assassin named Gorô, is ambushed. With him, an anxious and formerly ranked acquaintance… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| 0. The Fool. I’ve always had a thing for weird little freaks. They’re exactly what they sound like: people whose behavior is absurd or unsettling. They have complicated relationships with subjects like sex, drugs, and religion. They can be repressed or unhinged… Continue reading
|Casey Jarrin| Every morning in tenth grade, I’d press PLAY on my Panasonic VCR, the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now cued up and ready to explode into orange-red-pink pyrotechnics of helicopter-war-as-cinema-painting, soundtracked by Jim Morrison’s… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| High school…shit; I was still only in high school. Every day I thought I was gonna wake up and that book report would be done. I’d wake up and there’d be nothing written, and not much read. I hardly said a word to my sophomore English teacher until I said… Continue reading
|Chris Polley| Nine years ago, as is the American way, a viral car commercial brought us all together. Advertising Volvo’s state-of-the-art dynamic steering, it showed a chiseled man in his 50s atop two large trucks, his stance wide and firm, with one foot planted on each of the behemoths’… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| A lot has been written about camp, especially when it comes to film. It’s one of those delicious words that we all seem to understand, but gets so warped by bumps and nodules of meaning that its definition keeps changing. Maybe it’s like that old subjective definition… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| Way back in cable television’s Mesozoic era—when networks like the Independent Film Channel showed, you know, independent films, in the wee hours of Saturday morning right as Friday night’s winos and third-shifters were drifting off to sleep—one could… Continue reading
|John Moret| Ronin, noun, historical (in feudal Japan): a wandering samurai who had no lord or master.
On a wintry day in 2012, a friend and I met for our weekly movie and lunch meetup. It was his choice that week and he brought a new release from the Criterion Collection, Three Outlaw Continue reading
|Eli Holm| Suspended in anticipation, a man named Clerici sits awaiting his cue, a pawn of a larger game, too terrified to sleep, waiting to strike. He’s in a blank slate of ruin, without discernible emotion, putting on his mask of high-class clothing, tucking his gun, braving the winter air, ready.. Continue reading
|Finn Odum| (A Series of Facts and Asides Written in Remembrance of Brandon Lee). “EDITOR’S” NOTE: We’ve received reports that this essay was hacked in an attempt to blaspheme the opinions of our very own “Fanged Finn” Odum. We at Movie Review Website… Continue reading
|Rowan A. Smith| The Wild Bunch was a movie that for many years sat for me in a category most film-lovers are very familiar with: “I’ll get to it.” When I was a teenager, I watched a lot of the most beloved Westerns and didn’t find many I enjoyed. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties… Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch has been a staple in American cinema since its release in 1969. Mostly known for its aggressive violence and its intense style of editing, the film pioneered a new age of filmmaking and is often referred to as the day American cinema… Continue reading
|Dylan Walker| While I’m not really a video game person, I’ve been intrigued by The Last of Us franchise thanks to a coworker who sings its praises, positive reviews of the HBO show, and a mild crush I’ve developed on Pedro Pascal. So, the other day, I decided to spend some time… Continue reading
