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Modern America is born out of lawlessness and chaos in David Milch’s Deadwood: The Movie
What an improbable treat, in an age of unasked-for sequels, that one of pop culture’s most notorious cliffhangers would receive resolution. The HBO series Deadwood is not only one of their most acclaimed productions, but also the most lamentably unfinished. Its abrupt cancellation in 2006 was followed by persistent but vague promises of one or…
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France burns with religious mania in Ken Russell’s The Devils
Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) is a fictionalized account of the 17th-century Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier, tried and executed in Loudon, France. Questioning the authority of the Catholic Church is a controversial provocation at any time, but consider: if today, a sober movie like Spotlight (2015) is viewed as brave, then the The Devils’…
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No escape from the tyranny of continuity, in Avengers: Endgame
There is no escape from the tyranny of continuity. Like daytime soaps, superhero comics exist in a quantum state of constant churn and perpetual stasis. Characters are introduced and die and un-die, relationships form and split and reform, villains are defeated and rally and are defeated again. Excelsior, and collect your pocket change to spend…
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It’s a hard world for little things, in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter
The Night of the Hunter is a perennial source of fascination for cinéaste, both as a singular oddity in Hollywood history but also as a masterpiece in the truest sense: not only is it the best of what it is, it’s the only. “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing but…
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Netflix’s Triple Frontier is aggro, macho horseshit
J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Netflix’s latest high-profile exclusive, aspires to be a serious Expendables. It draws surface-level inspiration from the likes of Heat and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but forgets that you need more than square jaws and gun porn. There’s some dramatic potential in the premise of a heist orchestrated by veterans…
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Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 traps superheroes in motels and courtrooms
Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 sure went down easy when I saw it in a theater a few months ago, but it suffers on rewatch on the small screen. And needless to say, it was shortly rendered wholly obsolete by the best animated superhero movie of all time, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. While the real…
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Geneviève Bujold fights the medical patriarchy in Michael Crichton’s Coma
A thriller set among medical professionals, with just enough scientific accuracy to temper its science fiction, and a craven corporation perverting science for profit? If only Michael Crichton‘s Coma had been set in an amusement park, it would have been the most Michael Crichton movie ever. More than just a dry run for his hit…
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Noomi Rapace shoots ’em up in the Netflix exclusive Close
Noomi Rapace was seemingly set for big things after The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo films, but was shortly thereafter cruelly written out of her starring role in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels. I can only imagine how it must hurt for an actor to “appear” in a sequel only as a corpse, as she did…
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Liam Neeson has a rough ride in The Commuter
Jaume Collet-Serra’s The Commuter is the best comedy of 2018. I’m still laughing about the running joke of the Metro North running up the 4/5/6 line in Manhattan. If you find yourself on the Metro North Hudson Line, Make a quick stop in Beacon for a burger at Meyer’s Old Dutch Food & Such; honestly…
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Nicolas Cage descends into hell in Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy
Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy is what you would get if you crossed Straw Dogs with Hellraiser, co-directed by Tarkovsky & Jodorowsky. Do you think Clive Barker saw this and said “hey, that’s my thing”? It’s also the rare movie where Nicolas Cage’s customarily crazed mania is juuuuuust right for the material. Whereas his… performative performance (shall…
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Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome fracks it up
“You get an E for effort and an F for fracking it up.” That just about sums it up. I was a big fan of the mid-2000s Battlestar Galactica reboot and its sister series Caprica, but had somehow overlooked this pilot for a second prequel spinoff. Belatedly seeing it now, the plot seems too slight…
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The documentary Together and Apart tells the genesis of Genesis
The venerable band Genesis reconvenes to tell their own story, from progressive rock outsiders to mainstream pop success story.