
weekend watchlist: a movie worth paying premium VOD prices for
Plus horrors fantastical, hellish, alien… and all too down to Earth. (First published May 14th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.)
Plus horrors fantastical, hellish, alien… and all too down to Earth. (First published May 14th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.)
Passion, creativity, and suspense in stillness… [A teaser of an essay for Patreon patrons and Substack subscribers only.]
Behold ladyrage given full candy-colored, sparkle-sprinkled voice in an ironically comical spectacle: Haha, isn’t this delightfully absurd? Or is it? This is kidding-not-kidding on celluloid.
A wonderfully unexpected sort of horror movie, beautiful and delicate, but unsettling, too, with an authentic plausibility to the dichotomy between the invented uncanny and the human response to it.
The sparse, cold satisfaction that could be wrung from Trainspotting’s punk insolence has been replaced by an exhausted cynicism. Which is exactly right.
Like a theme-park mounting of the 1991 cartoon, or the blandified pop version of an enchanting signature character tune. A watered-down pastiche of itself.
Smartly elegant; the fantastic cast makes it worth your time. But it does feel as if it belongs on the small screen spread across six or eight hours.
A gritty woman’s perspective on tropes of the western genre, a lean action drama that is sparse yet sympathetic, and laconic but simmers with deep emotion.
A fantasy about Miles Davis’s life and music; loose, free-flowing, a kind of cinematic jazz. An astonishingly assured directorial debut from Don Cheadle.
Misogynistic, predictable, crammed with tonal shifts, and devoid of likable characters. Another young filmmaker has taken all the wrong cues from Hollywood.