“Eat, drink, man, woman, food, sex,” says aging chef Old Wen (Jui Wang) to his lifelong friend and fellow chef Lao Zhu (Sihung Lung). “It’s all the same. You can’t separate them.” For L...
2021-07-24 06:25:05 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s something almost preternaturally sad about Dave Davis’s face, a sense of noble but all-encompassing defeat in his slack jaw, gaunt cheeks, and bruised eyes. As Yakov Ronen, a mentally i...
2021-07-22 06:09:32 +0000 UTC View Post
Nicholas Cage has been a lot of things throughout his long and prolific acting career. Oddball Indie leading man, Hollywood superstar, coked-out weirdo, C-list jobber, and, most recently, a sort of...
2021-07-22 02:18:28 +0000 UTC View Post
I, Claudius, the BBC’s 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God, is an artifact of an entirely different television landsc...
2021-07-21 04:01:04 +0000 UTC View PostThis week's I Would Like to See It is late on account of travel and illness, but will be made up this coming week! Thanks in advance for your patience while I hack out my lungs <3
2021-07-18 03:16:09 +0000 UTC View Post
The supermodel Liliko (Erika Sawajiri) sits on a ledge, legs parted, hair thrown in a black river over one bare shoulder. Behind her, a mural depicting an enormous technicolor set of lips smiles fr...
2021-07-10 05:31:53 +0000 UTC View Post
The first time we really see Primo (Tony Shalhoub) cook, directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott shoot it with a pure and unrestrained but deeply skilled and disciplined joy, following the brisk...
2021-07-10 01:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s impossible to overstate how sexy Andréa (Andréa Ferréol) is in Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe. She’s a cheerfully vulgar angel of death, red-cheeked and Rubenesque, constan...
2021-07-03 05:01:05 +0000 UTC View Post
And so the month’s dive into recent Korean film concludes with Roaring Currents, or The Admiral, Kim Han-Min’s historical epic about the Battle of Myeongnyang in which disgrac...
2021-07-02 23:15:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Starting in July, $10 patrons and above are invited to a monthly Discord screening of one of my favorite horror movies! I might make this more frequent depending on interest, but I'm so excited to ...
2021-06-26 19:43:45 +0000 UTC View Post
“The unwantable woman” is a broad and thematically complex subgenre of horror. From the horny, delusional dysfunction of teen wannabe-surgeon Pauline (Annalynne McCord) in Excision to ...
2021-06-24 00:12:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom’s Shutter is riffing pretty obviously on Ringu, Ju-On: The Grudge, and other seminal East Asian horror from around the turn ...
2021-06-23 21:56:11 +0000 UTC View Post
The moral and cultural underpinnings of the “kidnapped daughter, vengeful father (or father figure)” genre are only slightly less regressive than your average police union, fantasies of justifi...
2021-06-21 21:25:25 +0000 UTC View Post
The script of Donald Cammell’s White of the Eye never tries to match the fever pitch of what’s happening on screen, but that’s not to say it doesn’t fall short. As towers of blaste...
2021-06-16 22:42:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Indifference, more than anything, is what makes exploitation and abuse not just possible but commonplace. Without callous authorities interested only in doing as little as possible and upholding th...
2021-06-11 19:49:56 +0000 UTC View Post
A triptych by the incomparable @horstmannart of a currently back-burnered Magical Girl story I'm writing
2021-06-09 18:28:50 +0000 UTC View Post
An unpaid cabbie, a jilted date, a hamburger ordered and abandoned; Scorsese’s After Hours is a veritable spider web of minor social obligations in which hapless everyman Paul (Griffin D...
2021-06-09 16:19:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Nestled between the tongue-in-cheek moralizing of its nearly Leave It to Beaver-esque opening and closing monologues, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid is a blackly satirical thrille...
2021-06-07 07:38:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Its final moments are marred by cheesy special effects, its characterization of its protagonist wavers somewhat in the second and third acts, and its typically excellent melodrama sometimes falls a...
2021-06-05 05:07:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Where does pain come from? Can you run your hand over the shape of it until you leave behind the silted delta of memory and come to the clear water of its source? In Kasi Lemmons’ 1997 drama ...
2021-06-04 03:22:24 +0000 UTC View Post
When Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror hit Alien hit theaters, it revolutionized special effects and kicked the wheezing horror genre into high gear. While Alien is without ques...
2021-05-30 02:25:58 +0000 UTC View Post
The double meaning in the title of Takashi Nomura’s 1967 Yakuza noir is plain from its opening moments. A gun opens any door for a man who knows how to use it, but death, in the end, is the only ...
2021-05-29 14:19:43 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s been twenty years since I first saw Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary science fiction/body horror film Akira, hunched breathless and nauseous just a few feet from the television, the vo...
2021-05-27 23:07:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Stoker is a Gothic story in the truest sense of the word, the barren mansion in which most of its action takes place haunted not by spirits but by human inability to form connection, by th...
2021-05-26 16:18:33 +0000 UTC View Post
The Mimic is an odd little film, its pacing erratic, its characters thinly sketched and airless, its setting a slapdash mess in which none of its players are firmly situated. It leaps from...
2021-05-24 16:01:44 +0000 UTC View Post
The first time we see Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki), the troubled teenage antagonist of Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary 1988 animated sci-fi film Akira, he’s marveling at another boy’s motorcyc...
2021-05-19 16:07:51 +0000 UTC View Post
On paper, Craig Goodwill’s 2016 erotic thriller Compulsion sounds like exactly what I want out of a trip to the movies: elaborate costumes, psychedelics, graphic sex and violence, unreli...
2021-05-17 18:43:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Mutilation is the mechanism by which torture compels its recipients. Our bodies recognize agony as a sign that soon our extremity will take on permanence, our body’s functions breaking down, liga...
2021-05-12 03:47:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Venom has perhaps the most unearned face turn in all of film. One moment the titular symbiote (Tom Hardy) is snarling that Earth is going to be a game preserve for his people, and the next...
2021-05-11 14:37:50 +0000 UTC View Post