8 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“The Forbidden Room” Is A Freewheeling Achievement
Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s The Forbidden Room is a tribute to a film that never existed. More accurately, it is a supercut of various fictional films—a stitched-together collage of associative links and vague thematic consistency. From one point of view, th...
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“The Final Girls” Is Deliciously Wicked and Surprising
It’s not every day that you walk into a horror movie expecting it to make you choke up. Usually, we pay the price of admission to scare ourselves silly and enjoy some good old-fashioned exploitative voyeurism; we watch imperiled characters get bumped off with ...
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“Yakuza Apocalypse” Is Loony and Incoherent
Somewhere near the climax of Takashi Miike’s unclassifiable new action flick Yakuza Apocalypse — a film arguably made up entirely of climaxes of differing intensity — a mysterious combatant in a ratty fleece frog suit reveals his final form. Battle with a rovi...
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“Addicted to Fresno” Has Surprisingly Little to Say
Nothing about Jamie Babbit’s Addicted to Fresno sounds bad on paper. Babbit has helmed episodes of Girls, Married, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in her career, while her partner, Karey Dornetto, has penned installments of Portlandia and vintage Arrested Development; ...
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“Deathgasm” Is Gleefully Over-the-Top
It’s best to think of Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm as the spiritual kin of Brendon Small’s great Adult Swim series Metalocalypse. They’re both gleefully over-the-top odes to all things metal—from the music to its ethos and iconography. Metalocalypse ran from 2...
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Modern Love in “The Honeymoon Killers”
The Honeymoon Killers is the kind of title that hints at sensational thrills, a promise true crime movies usually fulfill. The genre enables audiences to engage in voyeuristic pleasures; it reminds them that the terrible scenes they are witnessing are not mere...
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“Moonrise Kingdom” Charts Wes Anderson’s Cozy World
There are movies we love and then there are movies we want to inhabit. Certain special films contain diegetic universes so immersive, so rich and seductively real, that the desire to be consumed and placed into their little worlds is a constant from viewer to ...
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“Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon” Is A Flavorless, Unintelligent Trek
Reason #275839 why Aaron Sorkin’s mercifully short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip didn’t work out was its unduly inflated sense of importance. Everyone within the show spoke of the titular comedy institution with a hushed reverence usually reserved...
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“The Intern” Gets Only Partial Credit
Nancy Meyers wants you to know just how much she loathes the term “chick flick,” and with good reason. She’s had to deal with the condescending label time and again over her 35-year career as a writer, producer, and director, as though her work, though occasio...
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“Finders Keepers”: A Cult Classic in the Making
In 2007, small-time North Carolina entrepreneur / flea market enthusiast Shannon Whisnant purchased a barbecue grill from a storage company auctioning off the contents of units whose renters had failed to pay up. When he brought the grill home, he opened it up...
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