8 years ago
All posts by Andy Crump
“Good Kill”
Years go by, decades end, cultures change, and yet no matter the place and time, human beings constantly dream up new, horrible ways to kill one another. In the late 1600s, Sweden gave us the howitzer. In 1836, Samuel Colt invented the revolver and ushered in ...
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“Reality”
If a viewer can expect anything from a Quentin Dupieux film titled Reality, it’s willful surrealism. Reality and reality pass each other like two ships in the night, and one of those ships is an impish gallimaufry stitched together from bits and pieces of Magn...
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“Unfriended”
“Horror on a webcam” is neither a fresh aesthetic nor a new idea. Nacho Vigalondo’s unfortunately overcomplicated Open Windows and the 2012 omnibus joint V/H/S both use Skype chats to variable effect; if we want to duck genre, then it’s worth pointing out that...
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“The Dead Lands”
Thirty years ago, give or take, Toa Fraser’s The Dead Lands would have fit in nicely during the period’s boom of heroic fantasy films—Krull, Hawk the Slayer, Conan the Barbarian, Fire and Ice, The Sword and the Sorcerer—save for a paucity of camp. Not that The...
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“The Riot Club”
Lone Scherfig’s new film name-drops its own title so many times that it very nearly verges on self-parody. If a tenacious viewer felt so inclined, they could make a super-cut of every time anybody on screen coyly huffs and puffs about the eponymous ultra-exclu...
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Cop Stars: The Best Buddy Cop Films
What happens when you take two great things and mix them together? You get peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, breakfast stouts, snowboarding, candied apples, USB outlets, Freddy vs. Jason, and, perhaps most importantly, buddy cop movies. We’re all drawn to po...
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“Home Sweet Hell”
Once upon a time, Katherine Heigl had movie stardom within her reach. Now, she’s the lead on NBC's State of Affairs following a string of commercial duds in the early 2010s. There’s a whole article to be penned about Heigl’s rise and fall in Hollywood since on...
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“The Mafia Only Kills in Summer”
“Nun sacciu, non vidi, nun ceru, e si ceru, durmivu”, the old Sicilian adage tells us; “I know nothing, I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t there, and if I was there, I was sleeping.” Had the sage responsible for concocting this well-worn proverb been fonder of br...
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“Unfinished Business”
There are details about Ken Scott’s Unfinished Business worth respecting, or at least admiring. Scott has made a movie rooted in an indistinct business environment in which a woman holds a position of top authority; she’s allowed to be bluntly, even crudely al...
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“Futuro Beach”
Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach is a film that searches for beauty amid the crisis of life. Drilling down on that outline, it’s a film about life cycles; the foundation of its narrative, loose and shapeless though it may be, rests on the human connections made and...
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