Midsommar. The Invisible Man. Hereditary. It’s a common staple of horror, but lately lots of genre films have featured (white) women who are perceived as weak-minded and unstable until suddenly (and sometimes horrifyingly) they are not. Recent film criticism has interrogated the implications of such depictions of hysteria and emotional weakness in women leads. Remember […]
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Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man feels like three kinds of genre films melded together. One is a thriller about escaping an abusive relationship, in the vein of Sleeping with the Enemy or Enough. The second is a female-driven crime movie, like Double Jeopardy or Eye of the Beholder. The third is what Whannell’s previous movie, […]
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Bruce Willis has two modes — playing John McClane and collecting a paycheck. While the latter roles are usually direct-to-Redbox fare, to say that Willis playing some version of his iconic Die Hard lead isn’t meant as an insult. Audiences connected with McClane because he reacted to increasingly escalated situations in a more human way. […]
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It’s tempting to pretend that Gene Hackman’s career ended with The Royal Tenenbaums. Three-plus decades after his breakout performance in Bonnie and Clyde, the actor is at his prickly best as Royal, an absentee father in the last act of his life who’s hoping to reconnect with the family he rendered dysfunctional. A gruff man’s […]
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Blood on Her Name opens with a scene of intense immediacy. A young woman stands above a man’s corpse lying in a pool of blood on the concrete floor of an auto body shop. She looks both wired and weary, then gradually realizes she needs to do something. Did she kill him? It’s not clear […]
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“What happened?” the doctor in Sex Madness asks, of a female patient who’s come to him with a case of syphilis. “Tell me… everything.” He leans in a bit, and hits that last word… a bit too excitedly. It’s telling – in those two lines of dialogue, in those five words, the actor has summed […]
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Director Ari Aster’s goal with Hereditary wasn’t to make a horror film – it’s a family drama, first and foremost, portraying one family’s tragedies, one after another, via known horror tropes. The results are even more frightening than the conventional horror effort. Annie Graham (a phenomenal Toni Collette) is the essence of the film, allowing […]
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For over two hundred years, the world has been enchanted with Emma, Jane Austen’s tale of a “handsome, clever, (and) rich” maiden whose hobby of matchmaking reveals her flaws. Austen brought to life an array of colorful characters across a tidy class spectrum, from lavishly wealthy to modestly rich, with a sprinkling of the plucky […]
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The Call of the Wild will be the first encounter for some viewers (including this one) with the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios – formerly 20th Century Fox – and its awkwardly truncated logo. It feels like an attempt to claim nothing has really changed, that everything’s the same except for the name. If that intro […]
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One of the running refrains of Daniel Roher’s musical bio-doc Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band is that the group was more than the sum of its parts – each member was a gifted musician and force of personality in their own right, but that when they came together in this particular combination, […]
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There’s some sort of irony in Willem Dafoe providing the voice of a cartoon seagull just a few months after he so memorably appeared opposite a much more menacing seagull in The Lighthouse. Imagining Dafoe’s gruff bird flying out of the brightly animated Swift and into the grimy black-and-white world of The Lighthouse, ready to […]
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Jonathan Lynn’s comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000), released 20 years ago this week, is a crime caper that draws much of its comedic energy from the clash of two different types of masculinity. We’re used to this from the buddy cop genre and others like it, but Whole Nine Yards applied it to a […]
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