film reviews as long as the films
20969 words / mins total
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The film adaptation of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws. Unsurprisingly this is much more subtle, clever, and effective than SCREAM (2022).
Postmodernity and irony requires self-knowledge and it’s very easy for that sense of knowing to come off as smug. That’s the case when SCREAM ironically riffs on the idea of the legacy sequel, the requel, but does so without the core of sincerity that something like THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS or STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS has.
The Deserter in Disco Elysium talks about “[t]he mask of humanity fall[ing] from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone—everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world.
A haunted house story with the vibe of creepypasta, specifically the Backrooms. This has a lot of the DNA of THIS HOUSE HAS PEOPLE IN IT, SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE, and House of Leaves.
Martin Scorsese crafts a terrifically entertaining film that also manages to explore the intersection of identity and community in contemporary USA.
Martin Scorsese’s HUGO and Steven Spielberg’s THE FABELMANS would make a fascinating double-bil: one showing an artist in his late period exteriorising his love of cinema and the other interiorising it.
Who doesn’t love a movie built around a consistent rule scheme?: GREMLINS, THE PURGE, the Final Destinations. FINAL DESTINATION 5 made me wonder about a hypothetical Final Destination that exploits the internal logic of strictly ordered deaths such that, as long as the person in front of you in the death queue is kept alive, you could do whatever kind of dangerous stuff you wanted.
Despite being a B-movie horror with a terrible script mostly set in a single back garden, I was struck by how much the whole film is elevated by having a well-trained canine actor playing Thor (Primo).
The metaphorical linking of werewolves and menstruation seems so obvious and natural that it’s astonishing in retrospect that I’ve never seen it before, similar to the linking of vampirism and Catholicism in Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass.
Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is a conflicted Wife Guy, frustrated by his realisation of his wife as a sexual being and simultaneously unable / unwilling to consummate his abstract sexual desire with any of the women (or men) who throw themselves at him as he descends into Dantean circles of dream.