Midsommar movie review: välkommen to weird Ikea
It’s hard to escape the sense that Ari Aster is getting off on Florence Pugh sobbing and screaming as he fetishizes her terror and torment. And none of it is in the pursuit of any meaning or message.
Hostel
The House with a Clock in Its Walls movie review: good witches and not-so-good witches
Charming entry-level spookiness and nicely old-fashioned eeriness for budding fright fans. A disarmingly goofy Jack Black and a vamping-it-up Cate Blanchett meet in a comic middle that is perfectly pitched.
cinematic roots of: ‘Saw 3D’
In Saw 3D, the latest go-round in the torture-porn franchise, crazy person Jigsaw brutally punishes those people he believes deserve it. This flick sprang from (among other films)…
The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (review)
I debated with myself for quite a while: Should I endure *The Human Centipede (First Sequence)*? I knew I wouldn’t be able to unwatch it afterward…
watch it: “NATION’S PRIDE / STOLZ DER NATION”
The movie within the movie in Inglourious Basterds: Presumably this would have been a feature film in the world of Basterds, what with all the to-do surrounding its premiere, but still… this is a lot more than the “trailer” I featured last summer offers. It’s the back of Tarantino’s head starting around 3:12. Eli Roth … more…
trailer break: ‘Nation’s Pride’
Take a break from work: watch a trailer… Fooled ya: this is the “trailer” for the fake film-within-the-film in Inglourious Basterds. It’s meant to have been directed by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for propaganda, but actually it’s directed by Eli Roth, who made the low-budget Cabin Fever and then helped invent torture porn with … more…
The Descent movie review: classically scary
It may sound bizarre to say that a film about women under threat of vicious, violent death is a triumph of feminism, but there we are…
Wolf Creek and Hostel (review)
Bad Things Happen When You Leave the City Well, there goes my dream of driving across Australia. I used to think, Hey, if I’m ever gonna go to all the expense of traveling to the opposite side of the planet, and spend 24 hours on a plane to get there, I’m not gonna go for … more…
