scumbelievable

In the Flesh: Robocop (1987)

It’s hard not to think of predator drones while watching Robocop. Those sleek white fuselages cutting air, the breathless moment as missiles detach from long, stiff wings and streak towa...

In the Flesh: Nightmare Alley (2021)

I’ll never understand the interest directors have in Bradley Cooper. He has neither the flinty, affected intensity of Cruise or Fiennes nor the bland likeability of Hanks. He has no physical pres...

In the Flesh: The Night House

Raw-boned and vulnerable with her gangly frame and large, wet eyes, Rebecca Hall more closely echoes Shelly Duvall than does any other actress of her generation. After fifteen years of tedious cost...

In the Flesh: The Tragedy of MacBeth

The entirety of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth was shot on soundstages, and I mean it as a compliment when I say that you can really tell. Brutalist concrete parapets hang suspended ...

In the Flesh: The Baby of Mâcon

Here is a play: actors mill on a crowded stage while a crowd of nobles in the court of Cosimo de’ Medici III looks on, applauding and calling out responses to the players’ prompts. An aging, di...

I Would Like to See It: The Lost Weekend

It’s hard to make art about fictional art, especially when the fictional art in question is supposed to be good. The viewer has to believe that a novel that doesn’t exist could truly transport ...

In the Flesh: Thief

There’s a scene in Michael Mann’s Thief that has nothing to do with heists or lone wolf bravado or organized crime, which has no relation to D quality emerald cut diamonds or high-powe...

In the Flesh: Aniara

How do you live when your whole world is rotting around you? It’s a question the red-hot surface of which we’ve all spent the last few years of our lives pressed up against, and it forms the dr...

I Would Like to See It: Fedora

“I suppose you think me a vain old woman,” says the titular actress and movie star (Hildegard Knef) in the final moments of Billy Wilder’s Fedora. Her one-time suitor Barry Detweiler...

I Would Like to See It: Double Indemnity

I don’t know that there’s another movie which so perfectly captures the gut-churning feeling of knowing you’ve done something that would not just disappoint but crush a beloved teacher. Insur...

I Would Like to See It: Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole, as so many of Wilder’s films do, begins with a man down on his luck and out on his ass. Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas) is a reckless New York journalist with a long string...

I Would Like to See It: Repo Men

Repo Men contains somewhere within its biomass perhaps one fifth of a good movie, but much like the quick and dirty surgery its titular operatives perform to extract foreclosed-on artifici...

I Would Like to See It: Inland Empire

Were one to map film as a medium, Lynch’s Inland Empire might fall somewhere along the border between soap opera and found footage horror. Its shaky handheld camerawork and the raw, expo...

In the Flesh: Cats (2019)

I can only assume Tom Hooper saw the 2003 The Cat in the Hat adaptation with Mike Myers and thought, “I can go lower.” Why else would a grown man spend millions conjuring up a creative...

I Would Like to See It: The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh dices its main players into kaleidoscopic fragments, employing a visual style reminiscent of comic paneling to convey action, romance, and...

In the Flesh: Squid Game

Squid Game has a fascinating cinematic pedigree, evoking everything from SAW to Battle Royale to The Running Man as it spins its story of poverty, desperation, a...

In the Flesh: Barber Westchester

In her second feature film, animator Jonni Phillips creates a faintly Seussian alternate America in which an awkward and repressed young trans person — the titular Barber Westchester (Chris Kim) ...

In the Flesh: The Matrix Resurrections

The act of having a cake and the act of eating said cake are, at an existential level, famously and fundamentally at odds. It’s a narrative dilemma which has plagued thirty years of blockbuster a...

The Cuckoo, Chapter I: Two For Flinching

Manhattan, New York

1995

Shelby walked past Penn Station in the broiling August heat, hurrying so that no one would ask why she was crying. So that no one would look too close. She was ...

Deadline Hell

Hey gang, I'm sure you've noticed I'm a few reviews behind with I Would Like to See It. I just wanted to touch base and let you all know I'm in the middle of a move as well as finishing my second n...

In the Flesh: Spider Man 2 (2004)

While Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) hurled bags of gold bullion at Spider Man (Toby McGuire) after the latter, in his civilian life as Peter Parker, failed to help his elderly aunt May (Rosemary H...

In the Flesh: Spider Man (2002)

After two decades of Disney’s formulaic corporate superhero sludge, going back to the movie you could argue started it all is an almost surreal experience. Sam Raimi’s Spider Man bears...

I Would Like to See It: Calvaire

On a primal gut level, there’s very little as upsetting as the sound of a pig in distress. Not only is the high-pitched squeal they produce simultaneously infantile and abrasive, confusing our br...

In the Flesh: Sorcerer

Every inch of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is made with such exquisite attention to detail that by the time the payload of unstable nitroglycerin around which the film’s plot revolves a...

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In the Flesh: The Last Duel

The Last Duel opens with two knights at tilt, lances lowered, horses thundering over frozen earth. It’s a tense image, and Scott shoots it as though we’re riding hard on the heels of J...

In the Flesh: House of Gucci

House of Gucci isn’t an especially memorable film. It’s not offensive, either. Far from it! The movie hits its marks, gets in its little jokes, and then puts itself politely out to pas...

In the Flesh: Arcane, Season 1

Arcane starts out like a hundred other shows aimed at older kids and teens. A plucky gang of orphans stumbles headfirst into a magical adventure. Old hands reminisce about the fights of th...

I Would Like to See It: Demonlover

You don’t see many erotic thrillers positioning the acquisition of a hentai animation studio and its affiliated websites as their central conflict. Demonlover not only does so, but makes...

In the Flesh: Mad God

Shit pours down a funnel and into the mouth of a great ulcerous titan buried in the earth. It guzzles excrement without cease, processing ton after ton of filth through a bizarre system of organs n...