scumbelievable

I Would Like to See It: Throne of Blood

No one shoots a crowd like Kurosawa. Throughout Throne of Blood, loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, rooms and courtyards full of men fairly seethe with mass emotion. Wh...

I Would Like to See It: The Boxer's Omen

A Buddhist monk travels to Hong Kong to do battle with a dark sorcerer. With a single gesture he reduces the man to a bubbling pile of slimy, greenish flesh which then crumbles away, a time-lapse s...

I Would Like to See It: Klute

Among the fast-talking, hard-nosed, sexually aggressive ranks of film’s great noir detectives, its Marlowes and Gitteses, its Spades and Diamonds, John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is an oddity. He ...

In the Flesh: King Kong (2005)

No one could accuse Peter Jackson’s 2005 adaptation of King Kong of being a perfect movie. Its racist Adventure Film of Yesteryear elements look worse now than ever, some of its CGI feel...

In the Flesh: Cure

As inspector Takabe, Kōji Yakusho is like a crumbling monolith, his initial patience and even affect disintegrating as Cure progresses until either nothing remains of the man he was or el...

In the Flesh: Pulse (2001)

Little of what occurs in the first hour and a half of Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s seminal 2001 techno-horror flick, involves special effects of any kind. Aside from a single moment-long gl...

I Would Like to See It: In the Cut

“The only thing I won’t do is beat you up,” says detective Giovanni Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) at the end of a spiel about the kind of boyfriend he could be to Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan). He says it...

In the Flesh: Dune (2021)

About five minutes into Denis Villeneuve’s sprawling adaptation of the first half of Dune, author Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi classic, it becomes abundantly clear that the high wate...

I Would Like to See It: Three Outlaw Samurai

Three samurai, retainers of a cowardly and treacherous magistrate (Hisashi Igawa), burst into the chamber where louche prettyboy swordsman Kikyo (Mikijirō Hira) lies smoking opium with his lover. ...

I Would Like to See It: Andrei Rublev

Hundreds of bodies heave on cords of hempen rope, hauling a newly-cast church bell out of its casting pit as a crowd of thousands looks on in a rapture of nervous excitement. The hawsers creak. The...

In the Flesh: The Perfection

The Perfection is an odd one for me. To start, it has multiple glaring flaws. The lighting is intermittently terrible, washed-out and lifeless. The dialog sometimes veers too deep into cor...

I Would Like to See It: What Keeps You Alive

“Why are you doing this?” Jules (Brittany Allen) sobs to her wife Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson as an adult, Charlotte Lindsay Marron as a young girl) after the other woman first attempts to mu...

Goblins, Ghosts, and Gabaghouls 1.01: People Come Here to Die

A bloody hand slips from a butcher’s cleaver as a man collapses to the floor, leaving streaks of red across the polished steel. Boys with toy pistols run beside an empty swimming pool, mimicking ...

I Would Like to See It: Witchhammer

An altar boy sees an old beggar woman (Lola Skrbková) steal the host during mass. When he tells the priest (Jiří Holý), he sets off a chain reaction of suspicion and petty grudges which culmina...

In the Flesh: Black Mass

The last time I reviewed Mike Flanagan’s work, I panned it. His The Haunting of Hill House-inspired adaptation of the same name was saccharine sludge, full of overwrought monologues and ...

I Would Like to See It: The House that Jack Built

“I’m not stupid,” says Jack (Mat Dillon), the film’s eponymous serial killer, moments before we see him bluff his way into a woman’s (the great Siobhan Fallon Hogan) home by first claimin...

In the Flesh: Malignant

Malignant looks pretty good for a James Wan flick, which is to say it resembles a modestly ambitious episode of CSI — the original series, not the Florida one with David Caruso....

I Would Like to See It: Hana-Bi

Why water dead flowers? Why fly a kite without wings? Hana-bi, Takeshi Kitano’s 1997 Yakuza film, concerns itself largely with the beauty of caring for things that we’ve already lost. ...

I Would Like to See It: Phantom of the Paradise

To paraphrase my dear friend the game designer Jeeyon Shim, William Finley understands that acting is a profession totally devoid of dignity. As Winslow Leach, the film’s titular phantom, Finley ...

In the Flesh: Faust (1926)

Vast black wings unfurl over a medieval German city. A sooty face grins from the shadow between them as smoke boils through the streets below. Faust himself, played with a hawkish yet vulnerable in...

In the Flesh: Brand New Cherry Flavor

Disclaimer: One of Brand New Cherry Flavor’s three principal writers, Matt Fennell, is a friend of mine, though I didn’t know he’d worked on it until after I’d watched it

Dra...

In the Flesh: Candyman (2021)

Who dies in horror movies, and why do they get got? Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, a sequel of sorts to Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic horror film of the same name, seems to posit that you die f...

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I Would Like to See It: Tale of Tales

You might be forgiven, after decades of Disney “fairytales” and their “twisted” reboots — universally safe, morally digestible, and bland — for forgetting what fairytales are really lik...

I Would Like to See It: Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis is an oddity in David Cronenberg’s long history as a filmmaker. It’s cold where his work typically runs hot, overwritten where he tends toward sparseness in his dialogue, an...

I Would Like to See It: Naked

From the first moment Johnny Fletcher (David Thewlis) opens his mouth, the reason for both his constant success in charming strangers and his homeless and hated existence are both painfully obvious...

In the Flesh: The Suicide Squad

For better and for worse, Suicide Squad is James Gunn, aging shock jock and Troma alum, to the core. The camerawork is serviceable at best, the humor sometimes flatly sexist in a sneering ...

I Would Like to See It: She Dies Tomorrow

At first blush, She Dies Tomorrow feels like the kind of deadpan social thriller we’ve seen so much of over the past decade. Think Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster or Riley Stear...

I Would Like to See It: Like Water for Chocolate

I’m beginning to suspect that if you’re not a complete dunce, filming food and cooking is a pretty good way to ensure your movie feels richly sensual and intimate. Food is a shorthand for all k...

I Would Like to See It: The Platform

Like La Grande Bouffe and other eating-as-class movies of its ilk, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform locates class struggle in the fairly pat metaphor of who gets to eat wha...