Bothered and Bewitched

The Witch (2015, directed by Robert Eggers) has been the new big thing in the horror genre since it debuted at Sundance last year. Like the last new big thing in horror--take your pick between It Follows, The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, or what have you--it's a film with ambitions beyond the canned thrills of genre horror. It's a film that gazes into the abyss of America's myths about itself and about its founding and finds the abyss gazing back. The result is a bitches brew of feminist rage, religious critique, and a lacerating demolition of the ideal of the American as individualist. This is a horror movie as art film, true. It has the deliberate, slow burn of a contemporary art film. But that doesn't mean it skimps on the horror. No. Not at all. It ends on notes of such profound disquiet and shock that it renders moot the idea that they don't make genuinely shocking horror movies anymore. This is the real deal.

Note: here there be spoylers.

Render Unto Caesar

I don't remember the last time I had such a keen anticipation for a movie like the one  I had for the Coen brothers' latest film, Hail, Caesar! (2016). The Coens have been on a roll, after all, and the two trailers for the film were crackling with comic invention. Or, at the very least, the promise of comic invention. I probably should have taken notice of its release date. Superbowl weekend is traditionally an occasion when movie studios like to dump projects in which they find their faith is lagging. I should also have considered my own rocky relationship with the Coens' comedies. I mostly don't like them much. All of this should have set off alarm bells. And yet I still found myself getting carried along by hype.