In the forty years since the release of Brian De Palma’s ​Dressed to Kill​, the conversation has shifted from the controversy at the time over his treatment of women to the film’s transphobic twist—that the killer is a trans woman. When the Criterion Collection added the film in 2015,...

By the 1980s, the art of composing music for films had undergone several sea changes. The craft moved from traditional orchestration and classically trained musicians during the days of the studio system to more broad and experimental venues, with some scores created completely electronically, and...

It is strange to consider how often teen movies are about young women, and how frequently those stories are told by men. Look at the genre output from the 1980s to the 2000s, and female screenwriters are rare; female directors, even more so. Molly Ringwald was a genre princess, but her reign of...

War movies tend to fall into two camps. There are the ones like 1917, Dunkirk, or Saving Private Ryan that focus on the mental and emotional impact of battle on those fighting it, and there are ones more concerned with the technical and strategic aspects of the events depicted, like Tora! Tora!...

The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is about Freddy Krueger. With his burn scars, his tattered red and green sweater, his worn brown hat, and his knife-fingered glove, Freddy (as played by Robert Englund) has become a pop-culture icon, even for people who’ve never seen any of the Nightmare...

With theatrical releases hitting major obstacles, this summer has brought some truly incredible movies to digital/streaming/VOD.  Sadly, The Sunlit Night is not among them.  At first glance, this dramedy looks promising. It boasts quirky and charismatic stars like Jenny Slate, Zach...

On May 8, 1970, the AFL-CIO mobilized some two hundred New York City construction workers and sicc’ed them on about a thousand high school and college-aged protestors who were calling out the government’s actions abroad (the invasion of Cambodia) and at home (the Kent State Massacre occurred...

The 1980s, packed full of kid-driven adventure films, has just as many beautiful disasters as it does universally beloved hits. But to be included in either category requires a film to possess some sort of a legacy, be it positive or negative., The 1985 Helen Slater vehicle The Legend of Billie...

This month’s fringe VOD offerings include an alien invasion, a haunted mansion, and a psychic dominatrix, but none of that quite compares to the sight of a machine gun-wielding Kelsey Grammer. Money Plane (VOD July 10) What exactly is a “money plane”? Why, it’s a flying casino on which...

The Old Guard wants to be the first entry in a franchise very, very badly. Based on the first entry, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Greg Rucka (adapted from his comic series of the same name), that desire is warranted. The Old Guard is populated by complex characters with full...

“Don’t forget it,” a scrawled note vainly implores its own writer in Relic, a  gutting Australian horror movie about dementia and its effects on a family. A nightmare for anyone who has watched someone they love age and their memories slip away, and a cinematic experience made all the...

They say Twitter can’t really change your mind about anything, and maybe that’s true. But it can certainly solidify your thinking, pulling you off the fence about a questionable issue and setting your wishy-washy opinions in stone. Take, for example, me and this cursed...

Truffaut’s famous dictum regarding the impossibility of ever making a truly anti-war film is, usually, equally applicable to movies about cops.  Today, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others at the hands of law enforcement, much of the cultural...

It is fascinating now, in 2020, when Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader is a celebrated cult classic of queer cinema—recognized by the Criterion Collection during Pride, no less!—to look back on the film’s initial reception in 2000. The reviews were, to be blunt, cruel. Slate called it...

The first two minutes of Robert Hiltzik’s 1983 feature film crawl forward from the lake setting with overwhelming Manfredini-esque horns and strings. It’s a heavy-handed prompt: you’re supposed to be scared. You’re getting the formula. Or are you?  Relatively bloodless and...