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Talk to Me 2022
Exactly the kind of triteness you'd expect from two Australian YouTubers trying to tackle "elevated" horror. An onslaught of themes — grief, trauma, peer pressure, drug addiction, social media, mental illness — thrown at the audience for no other reason than to add the illusion of heft to the film's flimsy everything else.
It's telling that this supposedly deep and artsy (but really just blandly respectable) brand of genre film keeps on attracting this kind of non-talent these days, while…
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Sweet Whip 2013
Searing pinku rager, courtesy of Love Hotel (1985) and Evil Dead Trap (1988) screenwriter Takashi Ishii. The brutal scenes of sexual violence are all genre-typical sleaze — taken to ludicrous, numbing extremes in the 144-minute director's cut — and the extended sequences of BDSM torture play like a particularly harrowing take on Tokyo Decadence's descent into sadomasochistic depravity.
Strangely, the narrative structure recalls a respectable middlebrow drama, as do the voiceover narration and ironic juxtaposition between onscreen brutality and classical…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
Given our culture's current obsession with multiverses, it's unsurprising that yet another film should come around, exploring alternate dimensions and timelines. While the recent wave of universe-hopping action has so far mostly been relegated to comic book fare like the fantastic Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the wildly popular adult animated sci-fi comedy series Rick and Morty, it was only a matter of time until this very exploitable concept would find its way into other media as well. Enter Everything…
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The Tinder Swindler 2022
Pretty hilarious that this Netflix assembly line documentary expects me to sympathize with people who willingly got involved with someone they thought was either an arms dealer, a Mossad agent or the heir to a fortune built through owning diamond mines in Angola and building settlements in the West Bank.