A few years ago, I caught a late flight back to New York after visiting home for the holidays. As is often the case with air travel, the journey was a series of small disasters: takeoff was delayed several times, turbulence made it impossible to get any shuteye, and my seat had a malfunctioning headphone port. For the sake of my sanity, I decided to occupy my mind by browsing the available DIRECTV channels. I eventually settled on The Matrix Revolutions (specifically the clim

[The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!] Quite early on in director Lav Diaz’s Magellan, the governor of a newly conquered territory outlines the Portuguese crown’s imperialist ambitions. Their mission, he explains to the assembled soldiers, is threefold: to spread Christianity at the point of a sword, to extinguish the influence of “heretical” religions, and—perhaps most importantly—to seize control of global trade routes, thus toppling rival nat

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] When I was growing up, the original Faces of Death was the most infamous film that nobody in my peer group had actually seen. It existed only as a whispered rumor that circulated around the school cafeteria: a movie that featured 100% genuine  gore—authentic executions, suicides, Satanic rituals, car accidents, animal attacks, and autopsies. There was always an older kid that claimed to have acquired a b

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Recently, I’ve seen many hyperbolic statements circulating online declaring that Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8  is the “best video game adaptation ever made.” Having never personally played the source material (which I’d honestly kind of dismissed as shallow streamer bait—mechanically simplistic, deliberately designed to provoke humorous reactions to jump scares, little else of substance to offer), I cannot acc

[ The following review contains MINOR   SPOILERS; YOU HAVE HEEN WARNED! ] I won’t beat around the bush: The Super Mario Galaxy Movie  isn’t particularly good. Video games are already notoriously difficult to adapt—the medium is, after all, inherently interactive , a quality that cinema simply cannot replicate—and the folks at Illumination Entertainment make basically every wrong creative choice imaginable. The film lacks any semblance of a cohesive narrative structure, priori

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] At first glance, it’s a perfectly mundane image: the lobby of a public building. You’ve probably occupied hundreds  of identical spaces over the course of your lifetime; indeed, the associated sensory details are so intimately familiar that a glimpse alone is enough to evoke them: the texture of the tile floor, the odor of the air conditioner, the faint buzz of the fluorescent lights. The longer your gaze

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The first movie I ever saw at Japan Society, way back in the ancient pre-COVID days of 2017, was a Meiko Kaji vehicle—specifically Blind Woman’s Curse , a delightfully weird relic of ‘70s exploitation cinema that blends chanbara  action, horror, grotesque comedy, and Butoh  into an unclassifiable cocktail of disparate yet harmonious artistic disciplines. So obviously, when the venue’s fine film programmer

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The first Ready or Not  was a delightful surprise. I initially threw it on just to kill some time during a long airplane flight, only to find myself thoroughly entertained by its tight narrative structure, irreverent tone, and solid ensemble cast (especially Henry Czerny, who has been my favorite character actor since I saw Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible at age nine). Although the marketing had pre

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] When I was younger, I was obsessed with the phenomenon of “backmasking.” I have many fond memories of huddling over my desk until three o’clock in the morning, illuminated only by the glow of my computer monitor, listening intently to reversed audio clips. Being a skeptic, of course, I never truly believed that the purported “hidden messages” contained therein were authentic. Nevertheless, I marveled at t

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] A fiery sun blazes in a golden sky, scorching the earth below. Restless insects buzz and drone relentlessly, filling the still, sweltering air with a monotonous cacophony. And draped above a fleet of beached ships, limp sails hang motionlessly, undisturbed by even the gentlest breeze. The opening images of Iphigenia  immediately establish the film’s central conflict and narrative stakes. The assembled arm

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] There’s something inherently unnerving about shot-on-video horror. For an entire generation—namely, my own—the near universal accessibility of VHS made it the medium of the average Joe; its visual language was that of everyday life: weddings, birthday parties, Christmas mornings, family reunions, school functions. Consequently, images of violence (even obviously simulated violence) captured by commercial

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] The “revenge film” has become a genre unto itself at this point. Death Wish , Rolling Thunder , John Wick , Lady Snowblood , Oldboy , any of the innumerable adaptations of Hamlet —viewers have become so intimately familiar with the basic tropes, conventions, and archetypes associated with these stories that I needn’t even bother listing them. The deceptively yet appropriately titled Revenge , on the other

[ The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Lancelot du lac  both begins and ends with scenes of shockingly graphic violence. Two knights clad in cumbersome suits of armor clash on a desolate battlefield, so thoroughly exhausted that they can barely lift their weapons. Finally, one combatant lands a decisive blow, beheading his opponent with one last desperate flail of his sword; the decapitated corpse collapses in a limp heap, gushing blood onto t

[ The following review contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Matango  is often dismissively described as a campy creature feature. Indeed, its basic premise—a group of vacationers stranded on a desert island encounter a hallucinogenic, radioactive mushroom that gradually transforms anyone that consumes it into a hideously grotesque mutant—makes it sound like the sort of trashy B-movie that Joel and the bots would mercilessly lampoon on Mystery Science Theater 3000

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Beneath its slick production values, gory special effects (including, but not limited to: shattered teeth, gouged-out eyes, mangled limbs, and bitten-off fingers), and zany slapstick gags (many of the aforementioned injuries are played for dark comedy), Send Help  is a movie about society in its purest form, exploring what happens when traditional hierarchies crumble and two people on very  different leve

Attended the Orphans at MoMA: At Play—Amateurs, Animators, and Avant-Gardes  program at the Museum of Modern Art today. What a delightful celebration of the miracle of film preservation! The showcase (a recurring component of the venue’s annual To Save and Project  festival) revolved around an eclectic grab bag of obscure cinematic oddities: avant-garde  experiments, documentaries, early talkies designed to be viewed in the comfort of one's own home, and much, much more. The

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] As a cinematic adaptation of Konami’s Silent Hill 2 , director Christophe Gans’ Return to Silent Hill  fails spectacularly. I don’t resent it for taking liberties with its source material, of course. Indeed, I’d argue that some of its changes—e.g., the revised setting of the climax—are elegantly pragmatic. Many of the more foundational alterations, however, are absolutely detrimental to the story, diminis

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] All You Need Is Kill  is based on the same novel that inspired 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow  (also marketed under the equally unimaginative—though admittedly accurate—title of Live Die Repeat ), but apart from their shared premise—time loop, aliens, mechanized armor, the many brutal deaths of the protagonist—the two adaptations couldn’t possibly be more different. Whereas the earlier Tom Cruise vehicle is a fa

[ The following review contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] I often extol the virtues of “economical” screenplays: in the most entertaining movies (those that belong to the “blockbuster” category, anyway), every  detail is essential and indispensable. Predator: Badlands  provides a good recent example of this storytelling discipline: the various obstacles established in the first two acts are eventually revisited during the climax—usually to be utilized as improvi

[ The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! ] Season 2 of Andor  unfolds with an oppressive degree of urgency and a palpable sense of inevitability. With the threat of the Death Star looming on the horizon (indeed, intermittent title cards supply a literal ticking clock, counting down the years until A New Hope’s  Battle of Yavin—not to mention the title character’s eventual demise), the walls are closing in on Rebel and Imperial alike. The Empire, de