With their numbing sameness, dystopian or end-of-world movie scenarios tend to grow tiresome, and even intolerable now that we have a four-year reference point for how true to life that stasis can be.
There is nothing quite so destabilizing as being told again and again that you are someone you are not.
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BY VIOLET LUCCA | October 31, 2021
One of the earliest memories I have is of my father pointing over to an abandoned rowboat in Dublin’s River Tolka and quite matter-of-factly stating that “a monster lives in there.”
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BY GLENN McQUAID | October 31, 2021
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BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | October 31, 2021
The TV is always on in Fatal Pulse. Set in 1991, the underground horror legend Damon Packard’s latest film is drenched in pinkish-bluish gel lighting, a movie-world glow enveloping all in its path—especially antihero Trent Dupont...
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BY CHLOE LIZOTTE | October 31, 2021
Insects are the worst kind of people. With all the venom-pumping, eye-gouging, and cannibalism, it’s a wonder they get around to maintaining our delicate ecosystem.
BY TOM PHELAN | February 26, 2024
A public case of professional disgrace has driven a journalist (Lily Sullivan) to hide out at her parents’ vacant, sprawling country home. But the young woman, credited simply as...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | February 16, 2024
Clocking in at a swift 87 minutes, Andrew Cumming’s feature debut is a slick, beautiful genre piece best suited for the big screen. Partially reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s…
BY MARGARET BARTON-FUMO | February 9, 2024
Sometimes all it takes is one sentence to demolish everything you thought you knew about a person.
BY STEVEN MEARS | February 7, 2024
Sweeping across centuries and continents to track the Orlando-like incarnations of its titular barbarian, French writer/director Bertrand Mandico extravagantly extrapolates on...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | January 30, 2024
A woman’s experience of empty-nest syndrome manifests as a supernatural return of the repressed in Robert Zemeckis’s cathartic ghost story, an exercise in classical Hitchcockian tension and plotting that...
BY MICHAEL KORESKY | January 24, 2024
There is a deep sense of overwhelming sadness that pervades Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter. Oil workers for North Industries, run by Ed Pollack (the perfectly cast Ron Perlman), join forces with an environmental investigation team led by James Hoffman (James Le Gros) to study...
BY RUFUS DE RHAM | December 30, 2023
Were you to remark that the 1940s represented a peak in American pop-cultural horror, most people would automatically think you were talking about movies.
BY COLIN FLEMING | December 22, 2023
Years ago, on Film Comment’s website, I introduced a column called Streaming Pile...
BY LAURA KERN | December 22, 2023
A philosophically infused coming-of-age tale and Victorian-era fantastical travelogue with overt nods to both Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is marked by flamboyance...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | December 8, 2023
Angel Dust (1994) is an energetically bleak film about the terrific ease with which we surrender our minds. Anyone who has been on the Yamanote loop service in Tokyo at 6 p.m. on a Monday knows something about...
BY TOM PHELAN | November 23, 2023
Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of The Exorcist was published the first week of January 1974, just after the film’s intentionally provocative Christmastime release.
BY NICHOLAS RUSSELL | October 13, 2023
It’s often said that you can pick your friends but not your family. Yet in an age of mass communication, it’s never been easier to track down an absentee dad or quietly unfriend a despicable relative on Facebook.
BY VIOLET LUCCA | October 8, 2023
At this crazy moment, when film history is caught in the grip of multiple clichés that grind on and on and on...
BY KENT JONES | September 10, 2023
I’ve reached a place of acceptance where I can admit without shame that I watch scary movies...
BY MELISSA LYDE | January 31, 2023