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The way horror film series typically work is that the first entry is notable, for whatever reason—it’s a great movie, it’s popular, it infiltrates the news cycle/culture—and then subsequent entries get worse and worse and worse, until there are no more.
Birthed during the cultural thaw that immediately followed the end of the Franco dictatorship, Basque writer-director and designer Iván Zulueta's 1979 feature Arrebato erupts like a massive discharge of so much repressed anxiety and despair.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
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BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
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BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
READ MORE >
BY STEVEN MEARS | Month 00, 2021
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
For no apparent reason, at the start of Rubber (2010), perhaps Quentin Dupieux’s best-known film, a sheriff pops out of a car trunk...
BY LAURA KERN | March 31, 2023
High-concept, no-frills horror is writer-director-editor-composer Andy Mitton’s modus operandi. While his four features (the first two co-directed with Jesse Holland) address vaster subjects of
BY LAURA KERN | December 5, 2022
Bones and All—Luca Guadagnino’s latest monument to ill-fated love, based on the 2016 young-adult novel by Camille DeAngelis—begins with a slice of the quotidian: somewhere in small-town Virginia, a roomful of teenage...
BY KELLI WESTON | November 23, 2022
The opening image of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future is arresting, enigmatic, exquisite, revealing an enormous capsized ship, long abandoned, surrendered to a second life...
BY JOSÉ TEODORO | June 7, 2022
Over 20 years ago I made an agreement with Darren Aronofsky to never write about his work. It was the very end of the last century, in a charming fishing village in eastern Mexico...
BY LAURA KERN | June 7, 2022
“You can lose everything else, but you can’t lose your talent,” proclaims “Baby” Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), a former child star plotting a doomed comeback. Robert Aldrich’s 1962 “Grande Dame Guignol” masterpiece What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was hardly the first film to employ the services of A-list actors...
BY STEVEN MEARS | October 31, 2021
Consider Titane a reverse-slasher: not merely because in place of the usual murderous man-child in gender distress, fueled by psychosexual rage to terrorize mainly (or most enthusiastically) his female victims, we have a gender-bending woman serial killer, primarily attracted to automobiles...
BY KELLI WESTON | October 31, 2021
Consider Titane a reverse-slasher: not merely because in place of the usual murderous man-child in gender distress, fueled by psychosexual rage to terrorize mainly (or most enthusiastically) his female victims, we have a gender-bending woman serial killer, primarily attracted to automobiles...
BY KELLI WESTON | October 31, 2021