As of now, X is the best movie of 2022.
It's a fantastic homage to 70s sex & violence-ploitation b-pics, avoiding any sort of meta crap and just hitting its beats perfectly.
On top of that, it provides a fascinating analysis and conversation on what sex means to both our popular culture and personal identities. It's an enthralling conflict of young vs. old age, puritanism vs. sexual liberalism, the confined yet secure familial home vs. dangerous yet alluring independence.
Oh, and…
Prologue: I saw a pre-screening of this with some friends from the Alternate Ending community at a dine-in brew pub theater in Madison, Wisconsin, for which I drove 140 minutes to attend. The experience was easily 5/5.
And in honor of this new super-long Batman movie, I'll now write a lengthy review of it.
So, to the length: The Batman is longer than my drive from Chicago to Madison, and *only* 100 minutes shorter than the…
The Dark and the Wicked is just really damn solid atmospheric horror; a great example of doing it on low budget. I love that Bryan Bertino never explains anything, instead just lets the fear of the demonic unknown percolate and seep into our subconscious. And there's just the right amount of violent gore, spotted properly throughout, to keep a guy like me going.
There's very little substance to the characters, but, honestly, that's fine - the whole point for these vessels…
M. Night Shyamalan isn't short of good ideas. He's just no longer good at executing them... he hasn't been for twenty years. The concept of Old isn't bad, where people inexplicably age rapidly on a remote beach that they can't leave, and there are some nice moments where MNS plays up one's general fear of aging to horror-effect. We're delivered a justification for what's happening at the end, and while I didn't hate it, I wonder just how necessary it…
One part half-baked horror feature, one part patronizing un-nuanced social messaging, and overall wrapped in up-one's-ass pretentious filmmaking from writer/director Alex Garland, who previously had a great track record in my eye. This is less high brow horror, more masturbatory self-gratification akin to Darren Aronofsky's Mother. (My god, the amount of slo-mo shots...)
Horror movies absolutely can and should use real life fears to inform their storytelling. But they're much more interesting when these fears are weaved in subtly, and…
