I’ve seen so few depictions of demonic possession that did anything for me. Sure there’s The Exorcist’s putrid, profane Regan, Raimi’s gleefully repulsive Deadites, the malignant mote of wandering light in Hereditary, but in the main horror movies are content to stop at “evil”. Not so for Tilman Singer’s Luz, which makes of its demon a sort of dreamlike braid of possessions woven across time, bodies and consciousnesses bleeding together in a causal loop, the minds of the possessed joined but neither u...
2024-10-03 19:35:14 +0000 UTC
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TCBY Treats. Mr. Buffalo. Pink Dot. Cheesecake Factory. It’s no accident that these symbols of metastasizing chain mediocrity keep popping up throughout Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. They reek of the New Money naivete which is the beating heart of the Menendez family, brutalized people whose sudden access to money and power has allowed their generational trauma to grow to grotesque proportions within the concealment of that classic abuser’s paradise, the American family home. They symbolize the glossy, impersonal f...
2024-09-27 05:53:26 +0000 UTC
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“...and at fifty, it stops,” says Harvey (Dennis Quaid), stripping and eating shrimp like he’s Denethor turned loose in a tomato patch. “What stops?” asks Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a faded actress in the process of losing her last toehold in the realm of fame, a vapid exercise show in the vein of Jane Fonda’s similar television work in the ‘80s. She knows the answer, of course: Everything. There’s no subtlety at work here, nor even the pretense of subtlety. The Substance is concerned, paradoxically, with emptin...
2024-09-21 00:28:59 +0000 UTC
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Now that’s how you make a creature feature. Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo is wall to wall hearty genre fare, from the beautifully introduced and fleshed out homo cuculidae, hominid brood parasites who let humans raise their young before coming to reclaim them as adolescence approaches, to the ever more battered and busted-up protagonist, Gretchen (Hunter Schaefer), digging deep to find unexpected reserves of courage and empathy. Singer’s not out to reinvent the wheel, he’s out to make a good-looking ham-and-egger full of m...
2024-09-18 05:35:32 +0000 UTC
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To paraphrase another great North American, there is an idea of a Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), some kind of abstraction, but though you can shake her hand and feel flesh gripping yours, she simply is not there. Gariépy is magnificent in the role of this dead-eyed ghoul, a model and online poker shark who watches snuff films of teenage girls without emotion and toys with the people around her like a spider testing the strands of its web, feeling for vibrations to guide it toward its next meal. The only things she seems to feel ar...
2024-09-11 01:27:06 +0000 UTC
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Take First Blood, swirl it together with Chinatown, and you’ve got a pretty solid bead on where director Jeremy Saulnier’s going with Rebel Ridge. His protagonist isn’t as riveting or dynamic as John Rambo, his script isn’t as tight or as cutting as Robert Towne’s, but he’s got a handle on the spirit of these films, the righteous wrath of the victim of police corruption and the sucking moral quagmire of small town governance and budgeting. If he had the guts to follow either trail to its conclusion, he...
2024-09-10 03:10:00 +0000 UTC
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The Hong Kong of director Soi Cheang's Limbo is half a step from an open sewer the size of a city, its alleyways choked with garbage, its buildings looming dead and abandoned over filthy streets. Its police are burned-out, grieving wrecks like Cham Lau (Gordon Lam) or fresh-faced young fusspots with mouths full of rotting teeth, like Will Yam (Mason Lee). Everything’s wet. Everything’s dirty. And down in the filth, down where rotting corpses mingle with everyday waste and broken mannequins grin mindlessly up out of trash compact...
2024-09-09 05:08:45 +0000 UTC
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Tonight at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, it's Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW as we continue our month of Hitchcock's masterpieces!
Membership is $10 a month, screenings are 7pm Wednesdays and 1pm and 7pm Sundays, all times EST!
2024-09-08 16:30:55 +0000 UTC
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Tonight at 7pm EST in the Deadlights Theater, it's Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO as we continue our month of Hitchcock's masterpieces!
Membership is $10 a month, screenings are 7pm Wednesdays and 1pm and 7pm Sundays, all times EST!
2024-09-04 16:49:49 +0000 UTC
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“I did it,” blubbers Robert (Jesse Plemmons) as he crawls into the arms of his lover, employer, and dom, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). “I did good, I did it, I did it.” The act he’s describing, and for which he is welcomed warmly back into Raymond’s arms after finding himself rebuffed over an earlier refusal to submit, is the kidnapping and vehicular homicide of a critically injured car crash victim, R. M. F. (Lanthimos himself). Abjection, as in all Lanthimos’s work, plays a central role in Kinds of Kindness, from Robert’...
2024-09-02 19:37:58 +0000 UTC
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It’s been a hell of a year for micro-budget filmmaking, and actor/director Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker is one of the most delightful entries in its weight class. With a visual sensibility somewhere between Adult Swim’s most aesthetically obtuse material and the crude collage and slapped-together animation of Wonder Showzen or, perhaps more relevantly, frenetic YouTube shorts, The People’s Joker clearly relishes its lo-fi, outsider roots, even before the narrative makes this stance explicit. Drew...
2024-08-11 07:01:08 +0000 UTC
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Shot in rich, saturated Super 16mm, Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak adapts Tolstoy’s short story ‘The Family of the Vourdalak’ into something at once intimately unsettling and imbued with the sense of suspended reality essential to all great fairy tales. Structured around the disturbing presence of the titular puppet, voiced by Beau himself with sepulchral old-world gravitas, the film cleverly juxtaposes its undead antagonist with the Marquis Jacques Antoine (Kacey Mottet Klein), another pallid, uncanny parasite the family can...
2024-08-08 21:08:52 +0000 UTC
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The melancholy in lord Corlys’s (Steve Toussaint) voice as he tells Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) the name of his rechristened flagship is the first of the season finale’s reminders of all the death that has already come about as a result of this protracted family squabble. And yet by renaming his ship The Queen Who Never Was, in homage to his departed wife the princess Rhaenys (Eve Best), Corlys shows something beyond melancholy, an almost fatalistic commitment to a war whose only possible outcomes are various degrees of doom. He’...
2024-08-05 06:00:24 +0000 UTC
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On a fundamental level, I think if you make a movie in which the Devil is real you should probably be able to conceive of more spectacular acts of evil than nuclear family murder/suicide. It’s clear director Osgood Perkins has some thoughts about the emptiness and malice of his suburban setting, but as in his previous I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, there’s neither a thesis nor a strong enough vibe to make it feel like much of anything. There are some great isolated images. The empty house full of fluttering plast...
2024-08-02 04:10:20 +0000 UTC
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‘The Red Sowing’ comes as close to horror movie territory as House of the Dragon has yet dared to tread. Its penultimate sequence in which a slew of prospective bastards of House Targaryen attempt to bind and mount the ancient dragon Vermithor is a charnel house nightmare like something out of The Descent, the hoary old monster gorging itself on burning human corpses while others stagger in flames through shallow pools of muck or simply scream and beg for mercy that very clearly will not come. Only Hugh Hammer (Kieran B...
2024-07-29 03:14:14 +0000 UTC
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There’s a lot to be said for the quiet competence with which Damian McCarthy and his team make movies. No lazy shots, no serious goofs in the writing, good solid jump scares with adequate buildup and expert deployment. Oddity may pose few novel ideas, but its bona fides are there for anyone to see. It has a clear connection to both its genre and cinema as a whole, hearkening back to everything from The Strangers to Don’t Look Now, and if its creature design hews somewhat uneven, that literacy ensures its framin...
2024-07-25 02:51:05 +0000 UTC
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The hottest televised kiss since The Americans segued from emergency dental surgery into sucking face, a cast of characters opening up with exquisite vulnerability as their world falls apart around them, the dragon Seasmoke bathing ser Steffon Darklyn (Anthony Flanagan) in torrents of flame at the knight’s moment of triumph, a riot in King’s Landing as the smallfolk from whom the episode takes its name start to realize they’re footing the bill for the crown’s demented civil war — ‘Smallfolk’ is playing all the hits, an...
2024-07-22 04:21:14 +0000 UTC
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There’s so much passion and attention to detail evident in every scene of Andrew Rakich’s The Sudbury Devil, such evident love of film and history, and such respect for the real people who lived in the depths of the past. It’s hard to care about cut-rate special effects and the absence of professional lighting when the production has so much talent in the wings and such a keen and clear artistic vision. From Goodenow’s (Matthew Van Gessel) bulging, Gollum-like eyes to the lyrical beauty of the film’s period-accurate script...
2024-07-20 21:13:44 +0000 UTC
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“Jailbroken robots, all they do is get high and screw all the time,” says hacker Roberta Williams (Marie Bouvet) of her robotic partner LEM (Thomas Roditi) with a mixture of fondness and irritation. In a movie so concerned with reasons for being and with their dark, nonsensical corporate reflections, it can hardly be an accidental line. All anyone really wants is to feel good and experience connection with others. Is it any surprise that, given their freedom, these artificial consciousnesses want to revel in it? There are intimations of ...
2024-07-20 00:06:19 +0000 UTC
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Emma. Laena. Queen Alyssa. The dead of House Targaryen crowd in close around prince Daemon, goading and tormenting him, embodying his lusts and insecurities. In his waking dream he takes his brother’s wife to bed as she murmurs that it was he who should have worn the crown. In the midst of lovemaking she becomes his mother, who died when he was very young, and whispers that he is her favorite son. Like so many of House of the Dragon’s men, Daemon’s psyche is circumscribed largely by his relationships with the women in his life...
2024-07-15 04:02:06 +0000 UTC
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I don’t think you could find a more shopworn story template than the one Wes Ball breaks out for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. An uncertain but promising young man, his village enslaved by raiding imperialists, strikes out on his own to discover the truth of the world, come of age, and rescue his family and love interest. About as original as those doughy half-baked sugar cookies you can buy in bulk at Market Basket, but you know, when you want one of those things, nothing else hits quite the same. Owen McTeague does good voi...
2024-07-13 00:30:02 +0000 UTC
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“The King has fallen, we must find him,” says ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) to a soldier kneeling on the field of battle in the shadow of Rook’s Rest. When Cole puts a hand on the man’s shoulder to rouse him, he collapses, bones and ashes spilling from his gaping visor. That’s the cost of covering yourself in glory. Cole may be a loathsome thug who helped foment a coup and a civil war because a teenage girl turned down running away with him, but it’s a harrowing experience following him through the battle as fire-breathing mo...
2024-07-08 02:43:32 +0000 UTC
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“ Jesus turned water to wine,” says the nameless nun (Frankie Thorn) to her confessor, discussing her rape at the hands of two young men. “I ought to have turned bitter semen to fertile sperm -- hatred to love. And maybe to have saved their souls. They did not love me. I ought to have loved them. As Jesus loved those who reviled him.” It’s a staggering declaration, the kind of human act that takes your breath away whether you find it repulsive, delusional, saintly, or terrifying. Traumatized and battered, this woman’s first thoug...
2024-07-07 03:46:59 +0000 UTC
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Special meat. That’s what the world calls human flesh in Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, a gripping, grisly story intimately concerned with the bestowing and revocation of humanity. A “head”, as the novel refers to domesticated humans bred and slaughtered for their meat, is not a person. Referring to one as a human being, we soon learn, carries stiff social and legal consequences. And what constitutes the line between these groups? As Bazterrica reminds us again and again with sledgehammer force, it’s a...
2024-07-04 21:12:17 +0000 UTC
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David Foster Wallace once compared depression to standing at a window in a burning house. The only ways to escape are to jump, meaning certain death, or to turn and descend through the flames, with no guarantee but misery, for a chance at survival. It’s an idea that echoed through my thoughts as I watched Agnes (Anja Plaschg) struggle to navigate the moral and psychological landscape of rural domestic life in 18th century Germany in Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath, a cinematic tour of hell on Earth based on...
2024-07-03 04:31:44 +0000 UTC
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In a Violent Nature opens with a decent oner as the undead mass murderer Johnny (Ry Barrett) claws his way out of the grave and trudges through the forest to recover his dead mother’s necklace from the thoughtless, ornery hick who stole it in passing. In case we couldn’t follow this Byzantine plot, we get a little snippet of Johnny’s memory of his mother talking to him in Hallmark Card about how the necklace means he’s her special boy. That we’re rehashing Friday the 13th, or rather the subsequent entries in the f...
2024-07-02 00:52:03 +0000 UTC
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“I forgive you,” says queen Helaena (Phia Saban) to her mother, the dowager queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke). Alicent is stricken by her daughter’s words, her huge, expressive eyes alive with tumultuous emotion. It’s a striking moment in an episode propelled along by sunk-cost willful ignorance, ancient grudges of forgotten origin, and wrongs endlessly relitigated and used as grounds for further evil. Sin begets sin begets sin, as ser Simon Strong (Simon Russell Beale) puts it over a memorable dinner with prince (although you’d better ...
2024-07-01 03:03:00 +0000 UTC
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“Another one burnt in the tray, like bread,” sighs the ravaged vampire Daciana (Diana Gheorghian), looking down at her failed fledgling. What is there to cling to when the wind of eternity has worn everything around you smooth as glass? This aching loneliness, and the fear of that loneliness, is the beating heart of Interview with the Vampire, the second season of which surpasses the shocking, effortless excellence of the first by a considerable margin. That same wind roars through the ruinous house where a much diminished Lesta...
2024-06-30 02:52:31 +0000 UTC
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A man tortures his own grief-addled granddaughter with the sight of her beheaded child for the sake of political messaging. A sadistic thug forces a loyal knight to waste his life in order to assuage his own pitiful guilt. Twin brothers sworn to rival claimants to the Iron Throne die in a brutal duel with one another, one by the other’s sword, the survivor by his own. What does it all have in common? It comes to nothing. Impulsiveness, idiocy, random chance, and pettiness fritter away whatever capital any of the power players vying for con...
2024-06-24 04:40:20 +0000 UTC
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You see a lot of overplayed hands in season premieres. Screaming, fighting, bombast, none of which are bad TV on their own, of course, but deployed in the absence of supporting context solely to ratchet up the drama and make sure people tune in again next week. Not here. Series co-creator Ryan Condal’s script is full of subtle characterization, surprising turns, and throat-tightening suspense. It’s television with a great deal of trust in its audience. When dowager queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) takes her father, king’s hand Otto Hightow...
2024-06-17 03:36:49 +0000 UTC
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