E.2.: The Extra-2rrestrial Thirty-five years after having his childhood disrupted and his worldview shattered by the arrival of an alien being, a divorced, alcoholic Elliott (Henry Thomas) is just starting to become functional again (with the help of his sister, Gertie, who’s now a therapist) when E.T. returns to Earth to look for his house […]
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Having missed it as a child and then being unsure which version I was supposed to watch, I never saw Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner until the “final cut” was released in 2007. And I saw that one twice, because the first time didn’t take. I failed to love it, and I thought it might be […]
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Star Wars creator George Lucas often talks about his motivations for creating the iconic franchise. He wanted to recreate the fun adventures from the sci-fi serials he loved as a child, and to give kids a moral, mythic tale about good and evil in the stark, morally gray cinematic era of the late 1970s. But […]
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Two genre masterpieces were released on the same day in the summer of 1982, both exploring a world in which hard-boiled blue-collar characters struggle to survive in an oppressive, inhospitable landscape, hunted by beings that only appear to be human. One of these films — John Carpenter’s The Thing — is usually referred to as […]
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Thirty-five years after the release of the original, we’re finally getting a sequel to Blade Runner! It’s an exciting time to be a film fan, and not only because we get to see more of Harrison Ford, everyone’s favorite disgruntled grandpa, revisiting another one of his iconic roles. The fact is, the original Blade Runner […]
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This year’s Fantastic Fest was packed with surprises, sexual deviancy, revenge, and sorrow, and that was just on Twitter. The movies were likewise full of intrigue — it was a good lineup, everything else aside (“How was the film festival, Mrs. Lincoln?”) — but the 13th edition of the Alamo Drafthouse’s celebration of genre cinema […]
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This weekend will see a lot of people saying aloud or to themselves, “They remade Flatliners?” That same question will resurface in a few months when it’s released on home video, and then the film will most likely never be spoken of again. While it should eventually recoup its low $20 million budget (plus marketing […]
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We’ll talk about the behind-the-scenes turmoil at Fantastic Fest in another wordpile. In the meantime, here are reviews of some of the notable films that played there. They don’t have U.S. release dates yet (except as noted), but we’ll let you know when they do. Tigers Are Not Afraid A tough, beautiful urban fairy tale […]
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I’ve been bemoaning the state of disability in cinema for the last year. But just like Neil Armstrong took one small step for man, last weekend’s release of the Jake Gyllenhaal drama Stronger might squeak the door open a smidge toward acknowledging actual disabled people in their own narratives. The true story of Jeff Bauman […]
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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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