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Monday, September 05, 2016

Beyond this Horizon

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No one is more pleased than I am that the new Star Trek film, Star Trek Beyond (2016, directed by Justin Lin) is head and shoulders bette...
2 comments:
Thursday, September 01, 2016

Living and Dead Girls

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This post was written a couple of years ago for a book project. That book has since fallen through, so I'm taking the opportunity to pu...
Tuesday, August 09, 2016

I Ain't Afraid of No Ghosts

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I was rewatching John Landis's Animal House a few months ago when it occurred to me that I was rooting for Dean Wormer. He gets the be...
Monday, July 04, 2016

Immortality isn't Forever

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Here are some more capsule reviews of what I've been watching this spring. The Age of Adaline (2015, directed by Lee Toland Krieger),...
Sunday, June 19, 2016

Lobsters and Tigers

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Hello movie world. It's me again. I know, I know. It's been a while. It's not you, it's me. On the off chance that anyone i...
2 comments:
Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Shelter from the Storm

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I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail Poisoned in the bushes an’ blown out on the trail Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged i...
Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Bothered and Bewitched

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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 th...
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Saturday, February 20, 2016

Render Unto Caesar

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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, H...
Sunday, January 31, 2016

Suburban Ghosts Revisited

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If you ever want an object lesson in the things that make a good movie vs. the things that make a bad movie, you could do worse than make a...
Saturday, December 26, 2015

Blunt Force

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I don't hate the Star Wars prequels. Indeed, there's a lot about them that I like quite a bit. I like the emphasis on politics, gi...
Sunday, December 06, 2015

Spectres and Apparitions

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Daniel Craig's fourth outing as James Bond, Spectre (2015, directed by Sam Mendes), has a valedictory quality to it, as if it intends ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The Criterion Blogathon: Viridiana

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Luis Buñuel's late career has been described as one of the great artistic flowerings in cinema. Starting in (roughly) 1961, the convent...
4 comments:
Sunday, November 01, 2015

Deeper Red

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The heroine of Crimson Peak (2015), Guillermo Del Toro's return to horror filmmaking, is named "Edith Cushing," a name with ...
Monday, October 12, 2015

Returned to Life

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One of the reasons that film noir has persisted in the cultural massmind is because films noir are so often epistemological. Questions of ...
Sunday, October 11, 2015

An October Challenge Trick or Treat Bag

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I'm not "officially" doing The October Horror Movie Challenge this year. I'm not aiming to watch all the films and I'...
Saturday, September 19, 2015

A Wolf Cub In the Desert

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Theeb (2014, directed by Naji Abu Nowar) finds its title character, a young Bedouin growing up in 1916, roped into a grand adventure. For ...
Sunday, September 13, 2015

Innocence, Experience, Sex, and Drugs

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In Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015, directed by Marielle Heller), a film set in the sexually liberated, doped up 1970s, the title character ...
Saturday, August 29, 2015

Gifted

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The Gift (2015, directed by Joel Edgerton) is one of those psychological thrillers that it's best to approach without any fore-knowled...
1 comment:
Saturday, August 22, 2015

Trans Women Scorned

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It's been a while since I've been as conflicted about a film as I am about Tangerine (2015, directed by Sean Baker). It's a fi...
Sunday, August 16, 2015

Say, UNCLE

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The Man from UNCLE (2015, directed by Guy Ritchie) finds Hollywood trying to breathe life into another pre-sold "franchise," pre...
Saturday, August 08, 2015

Clobberin Time

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I don't hate Tim Story's Fantastic Four films. Oh, don't get me wrong: they botch a lot of things (most notably Dr. Doom and G...
Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Hitting the Small Time

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Ant-Man (2015, directed by Peyton Reed) finds the Marvel superhero franchise experimenting with genre. The superhero film is flexible if y...
1 comment:
Monday, July 27, 2015

Rich and Famous

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I wasn't a fan of Amy Winehouse during her lifetime. Not because I disliked her music--I rarely heard her music in the radio wasteland ...
Sunday, July 26, 2015

A Final Problem

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I'm reading Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warnings , right now. One of the stories in that book is a Sherl...
Sunday, July 19, 2015

Salting the Soil

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The Salt of the Earth (2014, directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado) is one of those documentaries that confounds expectation...
1 comment:
Saturday, July 11, 2015

The Future, Postponed

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Terminator: Genisys (2015, directed by Alan Taylor) is not as bad as you may have heard. It's certainly no worse than any given city-de...
Saturday, June 20, 2015

Fang and Claw

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My long-suffering partner has much simpler demands of movies than I do. For example: when she sits down to watch a movie about dinosaurs, s...
Saturday, June 06, 2015

Ultron Unbound

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Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) finds the Marvel Cinematic Universe entering its decadent period. I'd almost call it the series' Br...
1 comment:
Monday, June 01, 2015

White Elephant Blogathon: Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea

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When I opened the email containing this year's White Elephant, I was convinced that I had seen my film before. It turns out that I was ...
Sunday, May 31, 2015

Start Your Engines

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There was a guy on Twitter assigning "Mad Max" names the week after Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, directed by George Miller) opened....