Here’s the thing about movie endings that are intentionally left open to interpretation: They only work if the audience leaves the theater believing (correctly or otherwise) that the writer and/or director did in fact secretly have an ending in mind. Especially where thrillers are concerned: Catch one too many red herrings on your fishing line […]
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Making a live-action adaptation of Nickelodeon’s long-running animated series Dora the Explorer was always going to be a bit tricky. The award-winning show is a sweet one — and a major coup for Latino representation (especially when it started back in 2000) — but it’s still an unabashedly educational program starring a 7-year-old and watched […]
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We’re the scarecrow people, have we got lots in common with you. And if you don’t start living, well, you’re all going to wind up scarecrow people, too. — XTC, “Scarecrow People” In the past few decades, killer scarecrows have become such a common horror staple that Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon could throw “The […]
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Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is a hit, and it’s clear that the Fast & Furious franchise has no intention of putting on the brakes. If you wonder what the future holds for the nearly 20-year-old series, wonder no longer! My intrepid barber, Jean, “got access to” Universal Studio’s plans for the F&F […]
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YouTube star Logan Paul assembled so many fellow YouTube stars to make Airplane Mode that it would be genuinely impressive if they were anyone but YouTube stars. Like, if you got this many famous actors or singers or athletes together? That would be amazing. Video bloggers? Eh. The question isn’t how they did it but why. […]
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Less a horror film and more a carnival-style hall of mirrors, writer-director Tilman Singer’s festival hit Luz is an elaborate maze-like debut feature. Visually dazzling, relentlessly provocative, hyper-erotic, languidly paced, and deliberately incoherent — much like the artiest European horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Suspiria and all of the giallo classics […]
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Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, a rare two-ampersand film, gives two of the supporting tough guys from the eight Fast & Furious movies their own blithe spinoff that keeps with the franchise’s aesthetic by disregarding the laws of physics and ultimately declaring itself to be about “family.” I feel like the returns are […]
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Following Jennifer Kent and The Nightingale deep into the heart of darkness is harrowing but also deeply rewarding — if you can stomach the experience of this full-on gothic waking nightmare. Slicing and dicing its way through any lingering notions of romance even the most well-intentioned modern Westerns (here’s looking at you, Hostiles) have about […]
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Being a teenager is tough, but it’s also thrilling, and the best teen movies capture the angst and the exuberance of adolescence in equal measure. Released 40 years ago this month, Allan Arkush’s Rock ’n’ Roll High School may have started out as a cynical, trend-chasing cash-in from notoriously trend-chasing B-movie producer Roger Corman, but […]
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“A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens,” wrote Dostoyevsky, “but by how it treats its criminals.” Genre cinema from across the globe often provides such insight through penalizing transgression rather than illuminating virtue. Across a number of titles at Fantasia Fest, what filmmakers of many nationalities and languages deemed […]
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Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) sits next to a skateboard at the beginning of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and for the rest of the film, which follows Jimmie and best friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) as they try to regain ownership of Jimmie’s childhood house, the board rarely leaves his side. It’s as much a […]
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