scumbelievable

In the Flesh: The First Omen

A few lines of dialogue that ring a little tin-eared. A final sequence which, while not bad, exists solely to tie things into a franchise. Aside from these minor and fleeting imperfections, Arkasha...

In the Flesh: The Taste of Things

Oysters nestled in soft pats of butter, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and topped with little pyramids of glistening black caviar. Ice cream spread with a wooden spoon between rounds of moist, light sp...

In the Flesh: Baby Reindeer

It’s been a long time since something rattled me so badly I had to step back and shake it off, my skin crawling, nausea roiling my stomach. Baby Reindeer rattled me that badly. I set it ...

In the Flesh: I Saw the TV Glow

“I’m sorry,” wheezes Owen (Justice Smith), limping through the dingy innards of the Chuck E. Cheese-like purgatory where he’s worked for twenty years. “I’m sorry about earlier. This new...

In the Flesh: Challengers

Guadagnino’s always been an odd duck for me, recognizably freaky in his preoccupations, but too tame and visually restrained to get me fully onboard with his execution. Challengers is ea...

June 2024 Schedule: DYKE NIGHT

6/2, 1pm & 7pm: LOVE LIES BLEEDING
6/5, 7pm: WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE
6/9, 1pm & 7pm: BOUND
6/12, 7pm: THE HANDMAIDEN
6/16, 1pm & 7pm: NEON DEMON
6/19, 7pm: TAR
6/23, 1pm ...

In the Flesh: Immaculate

The Catholic Church’s obsessive quest to maintain control over the bodies of women, through means both psychological and legal, has resulted in over a century of devastating misogynist violence, ...

In the Flesh: Monkey Man

Stylish, visually accomplished, and gratifyingly preoccupied with impact and momentum, Monkey Man is an impressive little action flick with a bracing spine of anti-Hinduvta politics. It sh...

In the Flesh: Infested

Fear of spiders is so commonplace that virtually everyone knows the clinical term for it, but making audiences feel the unreasoning, hysterical intensity of that fear is a completely diffe...

In the Flesh: Shōgun

Shōgun is something special, the kind of adaptational success you hope against hope to see at least once in a blue moon. A difficult and problematic piece of source material reworked...

In the Flesh: History of the Occult

“The future is over,” says Federicci (Agustín Recondo), pronouncing each syllable like he’s tonguing the empty socket of a pulled tooth. He can’t remember where he heard the phrase, or wha...

In the Flesh: Late Night with the Devil

David Dastamalchian does a lot of things very well. Conjuring up a believable turn as a late-night talk show host, it turns out, isn’t one of them. Late-night host Jack Delroy’s as flat as a pa...

May 2024 Schedule: BLACK BAG

5/1, 7pm: BURN AFTER READING
5/5, 1 & 7pm: CASINO ROYALE
5/8, 7pm: IMPERIUM
5/12, 1 & 7pm: DEEP COVER
5/15, 7pm: JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
5/19, 1 & 7pm: TINKER, TAILOR...

In the Flesh: Beyond Outrage

What if you stripped all the emotion out of, say, The Godfather 2? What if you cut all the scenes of home life, all the malaprops and blunders and arguments from The Sopranos? In ...

In the Flesh: Road House (2024)

I like watching men beat the ever-loving shit out of each other. I like oddball pugilists and seedy Florida scenery. I like Jake Gyllenhaal! Doug Liman’s Road House, a remake of the belo...

In the Flesh: Stopmotion

My defining flaw in all my relationships has always been my propensity for disappearing into my work. Finding a little success as a writer has only made it worse. I suppose I feel I have a better e...

In the Flesh: Love Lies Bleeding

Are there weaknesses in Rose Glass’s sophomore picture? Yes. Does its reach exceed the grasp of its special effects from time to time? Sure. It’s not a perfect movie, not the kind of thing you ...

April 2024 Schedule: BEATDOWN

4/3, 7pm: BREAKDOWN
4/7, 1pm & 7pm: BRAWL IN CELL BLOCK 99
4/10, 7pm: DRUNKEN MASTER
4/14, 1pm & 7pm: CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON
4/17, 7pm: TRUE LIES
4/21, 1pm & 7pm:...

In the Flesh: The Aviator

Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) pushes the field of aviation forward through brute stubbornness and creativity unfettered by knowledge or economic restraint. He pushes and pulls and demands and d...

Preview: Cuckoo Prologue

Prologue: The Good News

Angel’s Climb, Montana

1991

Monica Howard couldn’t stop cleaning. It was two days until her daughter Casey — seventeen in three weeks — came home f...

In the Flesh: Dune Part 2

Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) hangs on the reins of a massive sandworm as it streaks through the desert, dunes collapsing in its wake like tidal waves in colorless slow-motion...

In the Flesh: Sexy Beast Season One

I’m so incredibly pleased to have been proven wrong so many times in the past year. I try to go into every movie and TV show ready to be surprised and delighted, open to the possibility of joy, b...

In the Flesh: Poor Things

I think if this morning you’d asked me to sit down and watch a steampunk adaptation of Frankenstein where the monster was a hot girl and it ended with a happy polycule, I’d have told you where ...

In the Flesh: The Zone of Interest

Every frame of the first half of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest looks like a painting made by an alternate universe Norman Rockwell who served enthusiastically in the Hitler Yout...

March 2024 Schedule: Vibe Check

3/3, 1pm &  7pm: BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
3/6, 7pm: TITUS
3/10, 1pm & 7pm: SPEED RACER
3/13, 7pm: THE FALL
3/17, 1pm & 7pm: BRAZIL
3/20, 7pm: THE ISLAND OF LOST CHILDR...

In the Flesh: Life

That Daniel Espinosa’s Life is aping Alien hardly qualifies as an insight. Quarantine breaches, a terrifyingly efficient lifeform tearing through the crew of a claustrophobic sp...

In the Flesh: Ready Player One

I recently met my boyfriend’s four-year-old twins, which was very sweet and special. During the interminable runtime of Ready Player One I found myself continually drawn back to the memo...

In the Flesh: Kids

It took me about half an hour to realize that what Kids reminded me of with its relentless walls of dialogue and incessant, irresistible encroachment of misery into the lives of its charac...

In the Flesh: American Fiction

American Fiction succeeds in two ways: first, and rather indifferently, as literary fiction populated by the kind of well-rounded and complex, contradictory characters with which Thelonius...

In the Flesh: Brawl in Cell Block 99

Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughan) is a piece of shit. In the first few minutes we know the man we watch as he surveils and terrorizes his wife, Lauren (Jennifer Carpenter), bloodying his hands in the ...