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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There was cause for concern when Quentin Tarantino announced he was making a movie involving the Manson Family murders. It seemed likely, given QT’s usual approach, that the result would be tacky and exploitative, maybe even turn a horrific (and, historically speaking, comparatively recent) tragedy into violent entertainment. Most of his films have had killers […]
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What do you get when you cross Napoleon Dynamite with Fight Club and maybe a touch of Yorgos Lanthimos? Writer-director Riley Stearns (previously known for 2014’s Faults, along with a string of shorts) apparently knew there was no good answer to this age-old cinematic riddle, so he got to work making and mastering The Art […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever else he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) It didn’t take long for eager young filmmakers to imitate the success of Halloween (1978) by producing cheap, bloody slasher movies of their own, and it […]
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I don’t always remember specific experiences I had watching movies in the theater, but I distinctly remember seeing Open Water at a multiplex in the suburbs of Chicago in August 2004. Shot on digital video on a budget of only $120,000 and featuring no recognizable actors, the movie had nevertheless managed to secure a nationwide […]
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