Film Reviews
The Dark and the Wicked Is Visceral, Bleak, and the Perfect Horror Movie for 2020: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Two siblings venture out to their remote family farm, where their father is slowly dying and their mother is unraveling from grief. Something else is happening, though. There’s a darkness behind the sorrow, an evil slowly poisoning the soil… Something Wicked This Way Comes: Grief is on the mind. Thanks to our ensuing pandemic — and really, the collateral damage of our current administration — we’re a populace poisoned with misery. So much so that it’s become an appendage of our day-to-day, something we’ve had to deal with to check in and check out without losing our minds. In a timely twist of fate, grief has also informed some of this year’s most affecting films, be it Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods or Nat...
The Craft: Legacy Is an Uneven Love Letter to the Weirdos: Review
The Pitch: Writer and and director Zoe Lister-Jones returns with the long-awaited sequel to 1996’s The Craft. Similar to its predecessor, this story follows three teen witches looking for a fourth to complete their circle. Enter new girl in town, Lily (Cailee Spaeny), whose mother (Michelle Monaghan) has just moved in with her new boyfriend (David Duchovny) and his three teenage sons. What begins as a coming-of-age tale eventually transforms into a mystery with ill-defined stakes. When Witches Go Riding: The Craft has a complicated legacy to reckon with seeing how it not only inspired a generation of girls to explore the occult, but also provided important representation in the casting of Rachel True as Rochelle. In more recent years, however, the film has been re-evaluated for its questio...
Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You Documentary Sheds Light on What Drives The Boss: Review
The Pitch: It’s not every day that you record the 20th studio album of your half-century career in music. When that time does come, it’s worth memorializing. Such is the case with Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, the new making-of documentary now streaming on Apple TV+. Shot last November at Springsteen’s home studio in New Jersey during a four-day recording session with the E Street Band, the film does more than simply capture a veteran band making a hard job look easy. It also gives Springsteen a chance to expand upon and espouse the thoughts on legacy, time, and the creative process that animate the new record’s material. New Jersey in Winter: While it’s unlikely that Springsteen and his crew opted for a late fall recording date to maximize the potential for cinematic poignancy, that ...
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Lampoons an America Almost Too Ugly for Laughs: Review
The Pitch: Sacha Baron Cohen’s trojan horse/folk hero Borat Sagdiyev returns to America. Is nice. After disgracing his native Kazakhstan as the result of his successful 2006 motion picture, the once-famous journalist is asked to curry favor with President McDonald Trump’s good friend, United States Vice President Mike Pence (“Michael Pennis”) in the form of a gift: an animal. Borat must give Johnny the Monkey, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Culture and No. 1 porn star, to Pence. But there’s a snag. Inside Johnny’s crate is a stowaway named Tutar (Maria Bakalova), Borat’s 15-year-old daughter. Borat decides to offer his daughter to Pennis instead, a notorious “pussy hound” who can’t even be in the same room as women. When the plan fails — and we can explain why in a moment — Borat and Tutar, with...
Shudder’s The Mortuary Collection Offers Halloween Horror With a Morbid Mean Streak: Review
This review originally ran as part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: “The world is made of stories…” and they are left behind by the dead. Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) is an aging mortician tasked with not only caring for the bodies of his recently deceased clients but for the stories of their deaths. These he collects and keeps in the massive library of his sinister and dilapidated mortuary. After officiating the funeral of a child, he meets Sam (Caitlin Custer), a young woman looking for a job. Her interview takes a turn for the macabre as she asks Montgomery to scare her with his tales, setting the stage for this spooky anthology. It was a Dark and Stormy Night… Set in the vague past, The Mortuary Collection feels like Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark for twenty-some...
Netflix’s Rebecca Is Haunted by Better Adaptations: Review
The Pitch: As recalled in Daphne du Mauier’s famed 1938 Gothic novel of the same name, our narrator and young, nameless lady’s companion (Lily James) meets, falls in love with, and marries a wealthy, older Englishman and widower, Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), while on holiday in Monte Carlo and returns with him to his lavish Cornish estate, Manderley. She soon begins to notice the long, profound shadow her husband’s recently dead wife, Rebecca, hauntingly casts over Maxim; family and acquaintances; household servants, including cold, austere housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas); and even the animals. As the second Mrs. de Winter grows increasingly frustrated with the strange power her predecessor possesses, even from beyond a watery grave, she slowly begins to learn the truth ...
Michelle Pfeiffer Goes from Catwoman to Cat Lady in the Messy French Exit: NYFF Review
This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 New York Film Festival. The Pitch: Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a wealthy widow in her mid-60s, with a tongue as silver as the spoon in the mouth of her hanger-on son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges). Unfortunately, her gravy train is about to run out as her financial planner informs her she’s completely broke — a scenario he’s warned the mercurial Frances about for nearly a decade. Without skipping a beat, she illegally sells her worldly possessions and drags Malcolm (along with their cat, Small Frank) with her to Paris, along with the remainder of their funds. Together, they occupy her friend Joan’s (Susan Coyne) apartment and figure out what their next steps are — or, in the case of Frances, her last ones. Lost in Translation: At f...
The Wolf of Snow Hollow Adds Coen-Style Humor to the Werewolf Genre: Beyond Fest Review
This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Beyond Film Festival. The Pitch: In a small and snow-covered mountain town, a series of murders suddenly create a sizable body count, leaving the townsfolk frightened and the humble police force confused. When a rumor runs through town that a werewolf is behind the kills, coinciding with full moons and savagely torn apart corpses, John Marshall (Jim Cummings) is suddenly tasked with proving that lycanthropes are a campfire tale. This proves difficult when it’s added to his long list of pre-existing duties, such as taking care of his teenage daughter and watching over his sickly father. It’s Like Fargo With Werewolves: Jim Cummings is a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to film. No, seriously, the guy has dipped his toes into everything. Writin...
Freaky Expertly Balances Horror and Humor for a Hell of a Good Time: Beyond Fest Review
The Pitch: Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is a year removed from her father’s death and her family is still grieving. While her sister Char has fittingly taken the role of matriarch, appropriate considering her career in the police force, her mother has taken to the bottle. It’s also senior year for Millie at Blissville High and things aren’t particularly promising; the boy she likes doesn’t seem interested, she’s constantly picked on by teachers and students alike, and she’s anxious at the idea of leaving her mom behind. Keeping her grounded are best friends Josh (Misha Osherovich) and Nyla (Celeste O’Connor). Things take a very sudden turn, however, when she’s attacked by the legendary Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn) with a mystical knife that has them swap bodies. Now, she has 24 hou...
Synchronic Seamlessly Turns Paramedics into Time-Traveling Horror Heroes: Beyond Fest Review
The Pitch: Paramedics Dennis (Jamie Dornan) and Steve (Anthony Mackie) work together in the same ambulance and are also longtime best friends. Running the Garden District route in New Orleans, the two run into a string of incidents linked to a new synthetic designer drug, Synchronic, which is having preternatural effects on users. When a one-two punch of personal tragedy afflicts the friends, their lives are thrown into turmoil as they become inextricably linked to the dangerous narcotic. The Best Time Travel Stories Are Not About Time Travel: Time travel in film is usually best used when it’s a plot device but not the coda of the movie. Genre vets Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are magicians here, using the script and pacing to nimbly carry us through a science-fiction adventure that tr...
Neil Marshall’s The Reckoning Is as Bleak as the Dark Times It Depicts: Beyond Fest Review
The Pitch: It’s late 17th century England, and although the plague is no longer running as rampant as it once was, a new pandemic has taken over: witchcraft. The era of scapegoating women for anything and everything is prevalent and the main conflict in The Reckoning. Grace Haverstock’s husband has committed suicide, himself afflicted with the plague, and has left Grace and their newborn daughter to care for their small farm. When she falls behind on rent, her landlord attacks her and suggests she make payment with sexual favors. Grace spurns his advances. With his fragile male ego damaged, he accuses her of witchcraft, and Grace is put into bondage and undergoes a series of physical and psychological torture tactics in an attempt to have her admit her allegiance to the dark arts. <img ...
Totally Under Control Is a COVID-19 Horror Movie for the History Books: Review
The Pitch: COVID-19. Sorry, but there really are no breaks from this fucker until we have actual, steady control over this present strain of novel coronavirus. When the culture is illness, you don’t hide under coats until the whole thing blows over. You deal head-on. And this review for this particular movie will treat the issue in that way. Despite President Trump’s assertions that COVID-19 is “totally under control,” no, it’s not. And that, in a dish served cold and fast, is the case of the new documentary Totally Under Control. With 210,000 dead in the United States and rising, millions infected, and a president unwilling to acknowledge the hubris of his actions while himself testing positive for the disease, we’re far away from anything remotely resembling “control” at this present mom...
