Horror movies use every trick in the book to get butts into seats, including one that’s almost unique to the genre: focusing on something people are afraid of and making it the “monster” of the movie. That something could be anything from redheads to clowns, but one common thread across the decades has been targeting […]
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“That movie seemed very pleased with itself.” That was a non-critic friend’s assessment of Kingsman: The Golden Circle immediately after the screening, and it’s such an apt description that I have stolen it without attribution. Whatever you thought of Kingsman: The Secret Service (I liked it), the sequel is longer, more bloated, and less entertaining, […]
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While David Cronenberg has been synonymous with “body horror” for most of his career, it has been close to two decades since he made a feature (1999’s eXistenZ) that could be classified as such. (It’s also been that long since he directed one based on his own script.) In that time, his subjects have ranged […]
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“It seems like everybody loves Harry Dean!” So said David Lynch last October, as he presented the Vidiots Foundation’s inaugural Harry Dean Stanton Award to the man himself. Lynch was one of dozens of luminaries from the film and music world — including Anjelica and Danny Huston, Kris Kristofferson, John C. Reilly, Karen O, Ed […]
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It’s immediately clear that Mother! is not to be taken literally, as it starts with a reverse time-lapse of a rotting corpse in a bed forming back into a sleeping Jennifer Lawrence. That sort of thing doesn’t happen literally, not where I come from. The pleasure in writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s feverishly surrealistic allegory about God and […]
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You may not have noticed that there’s been very little buzz online about the 20th anniversary of Spaceman. That’s because you probably have no idea that Spaceman exists. It’s all right, though. Hardly anyone does. But perhaps they should. A little background for the uninitiated, which in this case includes practically everybody. Spaceman is a […]
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In 1991, Susan Faludi published her landmark text, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which argued that the 1980s saw the media perpetuate a series of myths and falsehoods in order to scare women against the strides they’d made during the feminist revolution of the 1970s. A large section of the book criticized movies […]
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Here’s what we know. It, an adaptation of half of Stephen King’s bestselling 1986 novel, had a record-breaking opening weekend and will finish its run at or near the top of the list of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time. Featuring no major stars, It was directed by Andy Muschietti, who had previously made […]
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Stephen King’s It enjoyed a monstrous opening weekend, and a big part of what makes it work is the thing of the title, the titular it — the “tit,” if you will. (You won’t? We understand.) Audiences know it best in the form of Pennywise the clown, but the It in It takes multiple shapes […]
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Numerous clowns have turned up on the big screen over the years, and with the release of It, there’s no sign of appearances slowing down. But the ultimate proving ground for a clown isn’t the big screen, it’s the Big Top. Here, then, are cinema’s most prominent clowns, definitively ranked by their likelihood to make […]
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Earlier this year, critics and fanboys the world over hailed James Mangold’s Logan as one of the great comic book films. A dark, violent look at a hero’s last days in a world that has forgotten him, Logan does for superhero movies what Unforgiven did for Westerns — it may be the dawn of a […]
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It is very long for a horror movie (135 minutes), yet covers only half of the Stephen King novel it’s based on, yet is full of half-mentioned details that seem to have been crammed in hurriedly. I guess it’s fitting that a nostalgic tale set in a childhood summertime would seem both eternal and not […]
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