What if your favorite pet died and you buried it in a place where it could come back to life? It’d maybe be a little different — and definitely a lot scarier — but hey, it’s still your beloved pooch, kitty or tweety bird, right? Bonus question: What if the …
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Remember Heavy Metal, the 1981 animated movie based on the French magazine Métal Hurlant? That feature-length hodgepodge of stories about stoner aliens, voluptuous androids, horny space travelers, dragon-riding heroines in dominatrix gear and other interstellar-overdriven pulp touches? “A step beyond science fiction” was the tagline; a 13-year-old boy peering at …
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“Dear Orson Welles…” — that’s the first thing you hear in Mark Cousins’ essay-cum-tribute to the man who gave us Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, some of the most baroque screen adaptations of the Bard ever made and the template for the modern maligned-maestro filmmaker. There have …
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Reed (Christopher Abbott) wants to stab somebody. Sorry, wrong word — he needs to stab somebody. Standing over his baby in the middle of the night, wielding an ice pick perilously close to the infant’s neck, the man can feel this urge overwhelming him. Luckily, his wife (Laia Costa) wakes …
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg — the Notorious RBG to those who cheer her 25 years of defiantly independent thinking on the Supreme Court — sure as hell deserves a biopic. At 85, the jurist is such a cultural icon that she’s portrayed by Kate McKinnon on SNL as a ball of …
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Sebastián Silva’s scathing, scorched-earth take on bro culture,code-switching and how best buddies double as bitter underminers kicks off with a mistake. Two guys are pushing their car down an upstate New York road, shooting the shit. One of them is waiting for his friends to come along and get them, …
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“The jungle is eternal,” purrs a panther — the second most charismatic black panther to hit screens in 2018, for those of you keeping count — to his “little brother,” a boy with limpid eyes and long back hair. This large, nurturing feline is referring to the home that provides …
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There are heist movies — and then there are heist movies directed by Steve McQueen, the incomparable artist behind 12 Years a Slave. Is the Oscar-winner slumming? Hardly. In Widows, about four Chicago women out to finish a robbery that their dead husbands barely started, the filmmaker brings everything he …
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In the first scene of Marvel‘s utterly unmarvelous Venom, an alien space ship crashes and burns on earth leaving behind a slithering mass of defanged, digitalized slop. That’s also a fair description of this puddle of simplistic, sanitized PG-13 drivel that Marvel has released instead of the scary, dark-night-of-the-soul thunderbolt …
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John Travolta, trying earnestly to act his way through a ton of lousy makeup and an even heavier slab of bad screenwriting, plays mafioso John Gotti in this chaotic biopic that jumps all over the place but still fails to manifest a pulse. As the Teflon Don tells us upfront: …
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